Fast way to filter illegal xml unicode chars in python?

Recently we (Trac XmlRpcPlugin maintainers) have been notified of the fact that the regular expression above strips surrogate pairs on Python narrow builds (see th:comment:13:ticket:11050) . An alternative approach consists in using the following regex (see th:changeset:13729) .

_illegal_unichrs = [(0x00, 0x08), (0x0B, 0x0C), (0x0E, 0x1F), 
                        (0x7F, 0x84), (0x86, 0x9F), 
                        (0xFDD0, 0xFDDF), (0xFFFE, 0xFFFF)] 
if sys.maxunicode >= 0x10000:  # not narrow build 
        _illegal_unichrs.extend([(0x1FFFE, 0x1FFFF), (0x2FFFE, 0x2FFFF), 
                                 (0x3FFFE, 0x3FFFF), (0x4FFFE, 0x4FFFF), 
                                 (0x5FFFE, 0x5FFFF), (0x6FFFE, 0x6FFFF), 
                                 (0x7FFFE, 0x7FFFF), (0x8FFFE, 0x8FFFF), 
                                 (0x9FFFE, 0x9FFFF), (0xAFFFE, 0xAFFFF), 
                                 (0xBFFFE, 0xBFFFF), (0xCFFFE, 0xCFFFF), 
                                 (0xDFFFE, 0xDFFFF), (0xEFFFE, 0xEFFFF), 
                                 (0xFFFFE, 0xFFFFF), (0x10FFFE, 0x10FFFF)]) 

_illegal_ranges = ["%s-%s" % (unichr(low), unichr(high)) 
                   for (low, high) in _illegal_unichrs] 
_illegal_xml_chars_RE = re.compile(u'[%s]' % u''.join(_illegal_ranges)) 

p.s. See this post on surrogates explaining what they are for .

Update so as to not to match (replace) 0x0D which is a valid XML character.

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