A little embarrassing: couldn't figure out how to avoid crashes when
    hardcore unicode occurs in description fields ...

def char_repl(x):
    """A little embarrassing: couldn't figure out how to avoid crashes when
    hardcore unicode occurs in description fields ..."""
    r = ""
    for c in x:
        if ord(c) > 255:
            r += "?"
        else:
            r += c
    return r