title: Get a list of all the encodings Python can encode to
body: <p>I am writing a script that will try encoding bytes into many different encodings in Python 2.6. Is there some way to get a list of available encodings that I can iterate over?</p>
  
  <p>The reason I'm trying to do this is because a user has some text that is not encoded correctly. There are funny characters. I know the unicode character that's messing it up. I want to be able to give them an answer like "Your text editor is interpreting that string as X encoding, not Y encoding". I thought I would try to encode that character using one encoding, then decode it again using another encoding, and see if we get the same character sequence.</p>
  
  <p>i.e. something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>for encoding1, encoding2 in itertools.permutation(encodinglist(), 2):
    try:
      unicode_string = my_unicode_character.encode(encoding1).decode(encoding2)
    except:
      pass
  </code></pre>