Remove all characters from a string who's ordinals are out of range

Question

What is a good way to remove all characters that are out of the range: ordinal(128) from a string in python?

I\'m using hashlib.sha256 in python 2.7. I\

Answer 1

Instead of removing those characters, it would be better to use an encoding that hashlib won't choke on, utf-8 for example:

>>> data = u'\u200e'
>>> hashlib.sha256(data.encode('utf-8')).hexdigest()
'e76d0bc0e98b2ad56c38eebda51da277a591043c9bc3f5c5e42cd167abc7393e'