I was receiving this complaint from Python: LookupError: unknown encoding: us-ascii.

I addressed it using this Stack Overflow answer from Alex Martelli:

# https://stackoverflow.com/a/1064308/14068848
def encalias(oldname, newname):
  old = codecs.lookup(oldname)
  new = codecs.CodecInfo(old.encode, old.decode, 
                         streamreader=old.streamreader,
                         streamwriter=old.streamwriter,
                         incrementalencoder=old.incrementalencoder,
                         incrementaldecoder=old.incrementaldecoder,
                         name=newname)
  def searcher(aname):
    if aname == newname:
      return new
    else:
      return None
  codecs.register(searcher)
encalias('ascii', 'us-ascii')

This creates an encoding us-ascii that is the same as ascii.