title: How to avoid unwanted characters in extracted table data?
body: <p>I am trying to extract world cup group table data. Here is my code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
  import requests
  url ="http://www.uefa.com/worldcup/season=2014/standings/"
  r = requests.get(url)
  soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content)
  table = soup.find('table')
  rows = table.findAll('tr')
  data = [[td.text.encode("utf-8") for td in tr.findAll("td")] for tr in rows]
  head = [[th.text.encode("utf-8") for th in tr.findAll("th")] for tr in rows]
  print head
  for i in data:
      print str(i)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Everything works fine, except I get some strange characters in output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[['', 'Teams', 'P', 'W', 'D', 'L', 'F', 'A', '+/-', 'Pts'], [], [], [], []]
  []
  ['0', '\xc2\xa0Brazil', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0']
  ['0', '\xc2\xa0Croatia', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0']
  ['0', '\xc2\xa0Mexico', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0']
  ['0', '\xc2\xa0Cameroon', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How to fix it?</p>