title: Python Beautiful Soup 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa5'
body: <p>Iam encountering some weird characters while web scraping some elements of the page . The characters that seem to give error are :</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>? ??<em>??Á¢¢Á? /?? />? /??? ?/¢¥Á ??%% ?Á ?</em>????Á? ?> /???¥??> ¥? ¥©Á ?>¢¥/%%/¥??> ?Â >Á? Â?<em>Á ©???¢ ñ%Á?¥???/% Á%Á?¥??>?? />? Â??Á? ??¥?? ??¢¥????¥??> ¢`¢¥Á</em>¢ ??%% ?Á ??À?/?Á? ¥? _ÁÁ¥ ?>??Á/¢?>À Á????<em>Á>¥ ??</em>??¥Á? />? ??__?>??/¥??>¢ ?Á</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>My code concerned is as below</p>
  
  <pre><code>url= "http://www.nsf.gov#######@#@#@##";
      #webbrowser.open(url,new =new );
      flagcnt+=1
      if flagcnt%20==0: #autosleep for avoiding shut-out
          print "flagcount: "
          print flagcnt
          time.sleep(5)
       #Program Code extraction
      r = requests.get (url)
      sp=BeautifulSoup(r.content)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Page : <a href="http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch" rel="noreferrer">http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch</a></p>
  
  <p>Iv read all pages on this error with some which suggest decoding and encoding but they dont seem to help.I dont know which encoding is being used here .Tried downgrading BS version but didnt help .
  Any help is appreciated . 
  Python 2.7  BS 4</p>