title: Conversion from U3 dtype to ascii
body: <p>I am reading data from a .mat file. The data is in form on numpy array.</p>
  
  <pre><code>[array([u'ABT'], dtype='&lt;U3')] 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is one element of the array. I want to get only the value 'ABT' from the array. Unicode normalize and Encode to ascii functions do not work.</p>