title: How to convert user-input into string
body: <p>I have the following url as one of my entries:</p>
  
  <pre><code>repr(input)
  u'www.imdb.com/title/tt1771636/\u200e'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If try doing:</p>
  
  <pre><code>str(input).lower()
  url = str(url).lower()
  
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u200e' 
  in position 29: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How would I properly encode this to a string and then make it all lowercase?</p>