encoding confusions

[Tim Arnold]

I have the contents of a file that contains French documentation.
I've iterated over it and now I want to write it out to a file.

I'm running into problems and I don't understand why--I don't get how the 
encoding works.
My first attempt was just this:
< snipped code for classes, etc; fname is string, codecs module loaded.>
< self.contents is the French file's contents as a single string >

tFile = codecs.open(fname,'w',encoding='latin-1', errors='ignore')
tFile.write(self.contents)
tFile.close()

ok, so that didn't work and I read some more and did this:
tFile.write(self.contents.encode('latin-1'))

but that gives me the same error
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 48: 
ordinal not in range(128)

this is python2.4.1 (hpux)
sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'

thanks,
--Tim Arnold