How can I check if a Python unicode string contains non-Western letters?

For what you say you want to do, your approach is about right. If you are running on Windows, I'd suggest using cp1252 instead of iso-8859-1. You might also allow cp1250 as well -- this would pick up eastern European countries like Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, etc where the alphabet is Latin-based. Other cp125x would include Turkish and Maltese ...

You may also like to consider transcription from Cyrillic to Latin; as far as I know there are several systems, one of which may be endorsed by the UPU (Universal Postal Union).

I'm a little intrigued by your comment "Our shipping department doesn't want to have to fill out labels with, e.g., Chinese addresses" ... three questions: (1) do you mean "addresses in country X" or "addresses written in X-ese characters" (2) wouldn't it be better for your system to print the labels? (3) how does the order get shipped if it fails your test?

import unicodedata as ud

latin_letters= {}

def is_latin(uchr):
    try: return latin_letters[uchr]
    except KeyError:
         return latin_letters.setdefault(uchr, 'LATIN' in ud.name(uchr))

def only_roman_chars(unistr):
    return all(is_latin(uchr)
           for uchr in unistr
           if uchr.isalpha()) # isalpha suggested by John Machin

>>> only_roman_chars(u"ελληνικά means greek")
False
>>> only_roman_chars(u"frappé")
True
>>> only_roman_chars(u"hôtel lœwe")
True
>>> only_roman_chars(u"123 ångstrom ð áß")
True
>>> only_roman_chars(u"russian: гага")
False

The top answer to this by @tzot is great, but IMO there should really be a library for this that works for all scripts. So, I made one (heavily based on that answer).

pip install alphabet-detector

and then use it directly:

from alphabet_detector import AlphabetDetector
ad = AlphabetDetector()

ad.only_alphabet_chars(u"ελληνικά means greek", "LATIN") #False
ad.only_alphabet_chars(u"ελληνικά", "GREEK") #True
ad.only_alphabet_chars(u'سماوي يدور', 'ARABIC')
ad.only_alphabet_chars(u'שלום', 'HEBREW')
ad.only_alphabet_chars(u"frappé", "LATIN") #True
ad.only_alphabet_chars(u"hôtel lœwe 67", "LATIN") #True
ad.only_alphabet_chars(u"det forårsaker første", "LATIN") #True
ad.only_alphabet_chars(u"Cyrillic and кириллический", "LATIN") #False
ad.only_alphabet_chars(u"кириллический", "CYRILLIC") #True

Also, a few convenience methods for major languages:

ad.is_cyrillic(u"Поиск") #True  
ad.is_latin(u"howdy") #True
ad.is_cjk(u"hi") #False
ad.is_cjk(u'汉字') #True

The standard string package contains all Latin letters, numbers and symbols. You can remove these values from the text and if there is anything left, it is not-Latin characters. I did that:

In [1]: from string import printable                                                                                                                                                                           

In [2]: def is_latin(text): 
   ...:     return not bool(set(text) - set(printable)) 
   ...:                                                                                                                                                                                                        

In [3]: is_latin('Hradec Králové District,,Czech Republic,')                                                                                                                                                   
Out[3]: False

In [4]: is_latin('Hradec Krlov District,,Czech Republic,')                                                                                                                                                     
Out[4]: True

I have no way to check all non-Latin characters and if anyone can do that, please let me know. Thanks.