def _encode_for_display(text):
    """
    Encodes strings so they can display as ASCII in a Windows terminal window.
    This function also encodes strings for processing by xml.etree.ElementTree functions. 
    
    Returns an ASCII-encoded version of the text.
    Unicode characters are converted to ASCII placeholders (for example, "?").
    """
    return text.encode('ascii', errors="backslashreplace").decode('utf-8')