Convert a Unicode string to a string in Python (containing extra symbols)

Question

How do you convert a Unicode string (containing extra characters like £ $, etc.) into a Python string?

Answer 1

You can use encode to ASCII if you don't need to translate the non-ASCII characters:

>>> a=u"aaaàçççñññ"
>>> type(a)

>>> a.encode('ascii','ignore')
'aaa'
>>> a.encode('ascii','replace')
'aaa???????'
>>>