def needs_encoding(s):
    # Checking for escape sequences or non-ASCII characters
    if re.search(r"\\u[0-9a-fA-F]{4}", s) or any(ord(c) > 127 for c in s):
        return True
    return False

data = "my string"
if needs_encoding(data):
    data = data.encode("utf-8").decode("unicode_escape")