title: Removing hexadecimal characters from a unicode object
body: <p>I am trying to remove the hexadecimal characters <code>\xef\xbb\xbf</code> from my string however I am getting the following error.</p>
  
  <p>Not quite sure how to resolve this.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; x = u'\xef\xbb\xbfHello'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; x
  u'\xef\xbb\xbfHello'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; type(x)
  &lt;type 'unicode'&gt;
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print x
  ï»¿Hello
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print x.replace('\xef\xbb\xbf', '')
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
  &gt;&gt;&gt;
  </code></pre>