Recent discussion on the mailing lists and in http://bugs.python.org/issue13997 make it clear that the best way to get python2 results for "ASCII-in-the-parts-I-might-process-or-change" is to replace 

    f = open(fname)
with
    f = open(fname, encoding="ascii", errors="surrogateescape")

Unfortunately, surrogateescape (let alone this recipe) is not easily discoverable.  

http://docs.python.org/dev/library/codecs.html#codecs.register_error but I haven't found a way to determine which error handlers are already registered.

The codecs.register (as opposed to register_error) documentation does list it as a possible value, but that is the only reference.

The other 5 error handlers are also available as module-level functions within the codecs module, and have their own documenation sections within http://docs.python.org/dev/library/codecs.html

Neither help(open) nor import codecs; help(codecs) provides any hints of the existence of surrogateescape.  Both explicitly suggest that it does not exist, by enumerating other values.