Truncating unicode so it fits a maximum size when encoded for wire transfer

Question

Given a Unicode string and these requirements:

• The string be encoded into some byte-sequence format (e.g. UTF-8 or JSON unicode escape)
• The encoded st

Answer 1

def unicode_truncate(s, length, encoding='utf-8'):
encoded = s.encode(encoding)[:length]
return encoded.decode(encoding, 'ignore')

Here is an example for unicode string where each character is represented with 2 bytes in UTF-8:

>>> unicode_truncate(u'абвгд', 5)
u'\u0430\u0431'