I'm getting a Unicode error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "fooxxx.py", line 56, in <module> parent = anchor.getparent() UnicodeEncodeError: 'gbk' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 8: illegal multibyte sequence I'm doing: s = requests.Session() to suck data in, so.. how do i 'replace' chars that fit gbk