def METHOD_NAME(a_string):
    """Given str (unicode, latin-1, or not) return ascii.
    Args:
      s: str, likely in Unicode-16BE, UTF-8, or Latin-1 charset
    Returns:
      str, ascii form, no >7bit chars
    """
    try:
        return unicode_or_str(a_string).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
    except UnicodeDecodeError:
        return a_string.decode('ascii', 'ignore')