The proposed patch adds the "namereplace" error handler. This error handler is almost same as the "backslashreplace" error handler, but use \N{...} escape sequences if there is a character name in Unicode database. Result is a little more human-readable (but less portable) than with "backslashreplace".

>>> '∀ x∈ℜ'.encode('ascii', 'namereplace')
b'\\N{FOR ALL} x\\N{ELEMENT OF}\\N{BLACK-LETTER CAPITAL R}'

The proposition was discussed and bikeshedded on Python-Ideas: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.ideas/21296 .