Message 129270 - Python tracker

See also discussion on #5902.

Steffen, your normalization function looks similar to encodings.normalize_encoding, with just a few differences (it uses spaces instead of dashes, it divides alpha chars from digits).

If it doesn't slow down the normal cases (i.e. 'utf-8', 'utf8', 'latin-1', etc.), a more flexible normalization done earlier might be a valid alternative.