It's essentially an updated patch 486375, this time
making a distinction of type for the passed string; if
it's Unicode, the function encodes it to the character
set specified as the charset parameter.
The reasons:
1. The function in its current version doesn't support
Unicode, throwing an exception if any non-ASCII
characters are found within it.
2. With this patch, we reach a sort of operational
symmetry on email.Utils.encode vs email.Utils.decode,
as it can be seen in the tests.

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The patch looks good, except that I cannot really see the
value in using "replace" for .encode. Wouldn't it be better
to get an exception if the Unicode string contains an
un-encodable character?

Also, the Python 2.2 way to spell the type test is

  if isinstance(s, unicode)

This makes use of the fact that the unicode builtin is a
type now, and it supports unicode subtypes. This is a minor
change, of course.

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2loewis:
In a typical email application, it'd be better to display
partially encoded text than to face a hard stop when trying
to process a message, hence 'replace'. Actually, the
encoding mode could be an optional parameter, but I don't
feel like deciding on parameters for a function not
developed by me. Barry?
The isinstance part seems to be valid, I'm updating the
patch here accordingly.

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Sigh, sorry for taking so long to get to this.

email.Utils.encode() is deprecated now, and I'd actually
like to remove it rather than patch it. ;) 

Shouldn't the Header class be used instead?

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I'm changing the status to Pending since I think this patch
is no longer relevant given that email.Utils.encode() is
deprecated.