Dealing with Unicode and ASCII using Python
Dealing with Character Encodings is (sometimes) hard. It's especially confusing for those who've never done it before. Converting text from unicode to ascii can be tricky. A lot of times, I'll import some data from a text file, and I just want to convert everything to ASCII and ignore anything that's not ascii (like MS Word's smart quotes). Luckily, this is fairly easy:mystring = mystring.decode('ascii', 'ignore')There's tons of great Python resources ...