title: Python: what does .encode('ascii', 'ignore') do?
body: <p>I am new to Python and am going over some code from work. </p>
  
  <p>I noticed there are a lot of lines that contain <code>row[0].encode('ascii', 'ignore')</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I did some reading and it seems like it is converting from unicode to bytes.</p>
  
  <p>Is it just a way to convert a string from u'string' to just string?</p>