After reviewing the stdlib code as Serhiy suggested and reflecting on the matter for a while, I now think it's better to think of this idea in terms of formalising the concept of a "WSGI string". That is, data that has been decoded as latin-1 not because that's necessarily correct, but because it creates a valid str object that doesn't lose any information, doesn't have any surrogate escapes in it, yet can still handle arbitrary binary data.

Under that model, and using a dumps/loads inspired naming scheme (since this is effectively a serialisation format for the WSGI server/application boundary), the appropriate helpers would be:

    def dump_wsgistr(data, encoding, errors='strict'):
        data.encode(encoding, errors).decode('iso-8859-1')

    def load_wsgistr(data, encoding, errors='strict'):
        data.encode('iso-8859-1').decode(encoding, errors)

As Victor says, using surrogateescape by default is not correct. However, some of the code in wsgiref.handlers does pass a custom errors setting, so it's appropriate to make that configurable.

With this change, there would be several instances in wsgiref.handlers that could be changed from the current:

    data.encode(encoding).decode('iso-8859-1')

to:

    dump_wsgistr(data, encoding)

The point is that it isn't "iso-8859-1" that's significant - it's the compliance with the data format mandated by the WSGI 1.0.1 specification (which just happens to be "latin-1 decoded string").