> Disagree. The original commenter is correct in saying that the naming scheme is not obvious. Something like to_bytes(encoding) would be a lot more clear.

But then function would do something completely different. "\x01\x02".encode('zlib') for instance is a bytes to bytes operation. The problem is that "foo".encode('utf-8') does not give you an exception. If the coercion would not be enabled you would get an error:

    >>> reload(sys).setdefaultencoding('undefined')
    >>> 'foo'.encode('utf-8')
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/.../encodings/undefined.py", line 22, in decode
        raise UnicodeError("undefined encoding")
    UnicodeError: undefined encoding

That's not any worse than what Python 3 does:

    >>> b'foo'.encode('utf-8')
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode'