escape() function doesn't handle non-ASCII text

[kovid@…]

The escape function in core.py raises a UnicodeDecodeError? when passed a non-ascii string. Instead it should either not convert to unicode or use 'replace' error handling. See the traceback in http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/ticket/650 for an example of an error caused by this behavior.

[cmlenz]

Genshi expects you to use unicode objects for non-ASCII strings. While there's a chance it'll assume UTF-8 by default in the future, it'll continue to do strict error handling. And there's simply no way to do proper character data processing based on bytestrings of arbitrary encoding.

See also #184.