Unicode -> String problem

[Jay Parlar]

I'm having a problem converting unicode text to string type with str(). 

The code snippet causing the problem is

if type(pageText) == UnicodeType:
                newText = str(pageText)

and the error message I receive is

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
  File "D:\MyData\HOME\PWA\Scripts\filter.py", line 60, in parser
    newText = str(pageText)
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

Now, I know there is a lot of precedence for these "...ordinal not in range(128)" questions, but I've looked around, and I 
haven't found anything that will explicitly do what I want, namely, completely remove any uncovertable unicode characters. I 
have to be able to parse this text afterwards, using a lot of Python's string functions, so I need 'newText' to be a string, but I'd 
really prefer not to have the various unicode strings (ie \xa0) showing up. Is there a simple way to convert the unicode text to 
StringType, removing the resulting unicode strings for unrepresentable characters?

Thanks in advance to anyone who's looking at this,
Jay P.