Is there an "pawk -b" back end filter to sanitized UTF chars to U+number so UTF doesn't get mangled in python? How does this compare to rascal[0] under python?

Is there an "pawk -b" back end filter to sanitized UTF chars to U+number so UTF doesn't get mangled in python? How does this compare to rascal[0] under python? [0] : http://www.rascal-mpl.org/ http://www.rascal-mpl.org/