How to filter (or replace) unicode characters that would take more than 3 bytes in UTF-8?

Unicode characters in the ranges \u0000-\uD7FF and \uE000-\uFFFF will have 3 byte (or less) encodings in UTF8. The \uD800-\uDFFF range is for multibyte UTF16. I do not know python, but you should be able to set up a regular expression to match outside those ranges.

pattern = re.compile("[\uD800-\uDFFF].", re.UNICODE)
pattern = re.compile("[^\u0000-\uFFFF]", re.UNICODE)

Edit adding Python from Denilson Sá's script in the question body:

re_pattern = re.compile(u'[^\u0000-\uD7FF\uE000-\uFFFF]', re.UNICODE)
filtered_string = re_pattern.sub(u'\uFFFD', unicode_string)    

You may skip the decoding and encoding steps and directly detect the value of the first byte (8-bit string) of each character. According to UTF-8:

#1-byte characters have the following format: 0xxxxxxx
#2-byte characters have the following format: 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
#3-byte characters have the following format: 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
#4-byte characters have the following format: 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

According to that, you only need to check the value of only the first byte of each character to filter out 4-byte characters:

def filter_4byte_chars(s):
    i = 0
    j = len(s)
    # you need to convert
    # the immutable string
    # to a mutable list first
    s = list(s)
    while i < j:
        # get the value of this byte
        k = ord(s[i])
        # this is a 1-byte character, skip to the next byte
        if k <= 127:
            i += 1
        # this is a 2-byte character, skip ahead by 2 bytes
        elif k < 224:
            i += 2
        # this is a 3-byte character, skip ahead by 3 bytes
        elif k < 240:
            i += 3
        # this is a 4-byte character, remove it and update
        # the length of the string we need to check
        else:
            s[i:i+4] = []
            j -= 4
    return ''.join(s)

Skipping the decoding and encoding parts will save you some time and for smaller strings that mostly have 1-byte characters this could even be faster than the regular expression filtering.

And just for the fun of it, an itertools monstrosity :)

import itertools as it, operator as op

def max3bytes(unicode_string):

    # sequence of pairs of (char_in_string, u'\N{REPLACEMENT CHARACTER}')
    pairs= it.izip(unicode_string, it.repeat(u'\ufffd'))

    # is the argument less than or equal to 65535?
    selector= ft.partial(op.le, 65535)

    # using the character ordinals, return 0 or 1 based on `selector`
    indexer= it.imap(selector, it.imap(ord, unicode_string))

    # now pick the correct item for all pairs
    return u''.join(it.imap(tuple.__getitem__, pairs, indexer))

Encode as UTF-16, then reencode as UTF-8.

>>> t = u'𝐟𝐨𝐨'
>>> e = t.encode('utf-16le')
>>> ''.join(unichr(x).encode('utf-8') for x in struct.unpack('<' + 'H' * (len(e) // 2), e))
'\xed\xa0\xb5\xed\xb0\x9f\xed\xa0\xb5\xed\xb0\xa8\xed\xa0\xb5\xed\xb0\xa8'

Note that you can't encode after joining, since the surrogate pairs may be decoded before reencoding.

EDIT:

MySQL (at least 5.1.47) has no problem dealing with surrogate pairs:

mysql> create table utf8test (t character(128)) collate utf8_general_ci;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.12 sec)

  ...

>>> cxn = MySQLdb.connect(..., charset='utf8')
>>> csr = cxn.cursor()
>>> t = u'𝐟𝐨𝐨'
>>> e = t.encode('utf-16le')
>>> v = ''.join(unichr(x).encode('utf-8') for x in struct.unpack('<' + 'H' * (len(e) // 2), e))
>>> v
'\xed\xa0\xb5\xed\xb0\x9f\xed\xa0\xb5\xed\xb0\xa8\xed\xa0\xb5\xed\xb0\xa8'
>>> csr.execute('insert into utf8test (t) values (%s)', (v,))
1L
>>> csr.execute('select * from utf8test')
1L
>>> r = csr.fetchone()
>>> r
(u'\ud835\udc1f\ud835\udc28\ud835\udc28',)
>>> print r[0]
𝐟𝐨𝐨

According to the MySQL 5.1 documentation: "The ucs2 and utf8 character sets do not support supplementary characters that lie outside the BMP." This indicates that there might be a problem with surrogate pairs.

Note that the Unicode standard 5.2 chapter 3 actually forbids encoding a surrogate pair as two 3-byte UTF-8 sequences instead of one 4-byte UTF-8 sequence ... see for example page 93 """Because surrogate code points are not Unicode scalar values, any UTF-8 byte sequence that would otherwise map to code points D800..DFFF is ill-formed.""" However this proscription is as far as I know largely unknown or ignored.

It may well be a good idea to check what MySQL does with surrogate pairs. If they are not to be retained, this code will provide a simple-enough check:

all(uc < u'\ud800' or u'\ue000' <= uc <= u'\uffff' for uc in unicode_string)

and this code will replace any "nasties" with u\ufffd:

u''.join(
    uc if uc < u'\ud800' or u'\ue000' <= uc <= u'\uffff' else u'\ufffd'
    for uc in unicode_string
    )