def encode_if_needed(value):
"""
A small helper to decode unicode to utf-8 if needed.
"""
if isinstance(value, unicode):
value = value.encode("utf-8")
return value


def encode_dict_if_needed(values):
"""
A wrapper taking a dict and passing each of the values to encode_if_needed.
"""
for key, value in values.iteritems():
values[key] = encode_if_needed(value)
return values