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There are encoding names that contain dots, such as
ANSI_X3.4-1968, ANSI_X3.4-1986 and ISO_646.IRV:1991 (as
reported by iconv). There are none in iconv's list that
begin with a dot. 

Please note that the behavior of this function has been
discussed before in Python bugs 513666 and 960874. Apologies
for not referencing them in my original report. 

Having stepped through the code, I understand how the
ValueError is getting generated. My frustration with this as
a programmer is that I want to write specific except clauses
for each possible exception that a method can raise, but
that's impractical if any exception is fair game on any
method. So I'm forced to use a catch-all except clause about
which the Python documentation says (wisely, IMHO), "Use
this with extreme caution, since it is easy to mask a real
programming error in this way!" While it is helpful to
document errors that a method is *likely* to raise, my code
needs to handle all possibilities, not just likely ones.

Perhaps the answer is just, "This is how Python works" and
if I feel it is a weakness in the language I need to take it
up on a different level.