title: python unicode replace backslash u with an empty string
body: <p>I'm sanitizing a pandas dataframe and encounters unicode string that has a <code>u</code> inside it with a backslash than I need to replace e.g.</p>
  <pre><code>u'\u2014'.replace('\u','')
  Result: u'\u2014'
  </code></pre>
  <p>I've tried encoding it as <code>utf-8</code> then decoding it but that didn't work and I feel there must be an easier way around this.</p>
  <h1>pandas code</h1>
  <pre><code>merged['Rank World Bank'] = merged['Rank World Bank'].astype(str)
  </code></pre>
  <p>Error</p>
  <pre><code>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2014' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>