title: Convert Unicode to ASCII without errors in Python
body: <p>My code just scrapes a web page, then converts it to Unicode.</p>
  
  <pre><code>html = urllib.urlopen(link).read()
  html.encode("utf8","ignore")
  self.response.out.write(html)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But I get a <code>UnicodeDecodeError</code>:</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <pre><code>Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 507, in __call__
      handler.get(*groups)
    File "/Users/greg/clounce/main.py", line 55, in get
      html.encode("utf8","ignore")
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 2818: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I assume that means the HTML contains some wrongly-formed attempt at Unicode somewhere. <strong>Can I just drop whatever code bytes are causing the problem instead of getting an error?</strong></p>