unicode problem?

[Brian Blais]

This may be a stemming from my complete ignorance of unicode, but when I do this (Python 2.6):

s='\xc2\xa9 2008 \r\n'

and I want the ascii version of it, ignoring any non-ascii chars, I thought I could do:

s.encode('ascii','ignore')

but it gives the error:

In [20]:s.encode('ascii','ignore')
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)

/Users/bblais/python/doit100810a.py in <module>()
----> 1 
      2 
      3 
      4 
      5 

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

am I doing something stupid here?

of course, as a workaround, I can do: ''.join([c for c in s if ord(c)<128])

but I thought the encode call should work.

		thanks,
			bb

-- 
Brian Blais
bblais at bryant.edu
http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais
http://bblais.blogspot.com/