Stripping unencodable characters from a string

Tue May 5 14:19:34 EDT 2015

I want to write a string to an already-open file (sys.stdout, typically). However, I *don't* want encoding errors, and the string could be arbitrary Unicode (in theory). The best way I've found is
 data = data.encode(file.encoding, errors='replace').decode(file.encoding)
 file.write(data)
(I'd probably use backslashreplace rather than replace, but that's a minor point).
Is that the best way? The multiple re-encoding dance seems a bit clumsy, but it was the best I could think of.
Thanks,
Paul.