string.replace non-ascii characters

[Samuel Karl Peterson]

Greetings Pythonistas.  I have recently discovered a strange anomoly
with string.replace.  It seemingly, randomly does not deal with
characters of ordinal value > 127.  I ran into this problem while
downloading auction web pages from ebay and trying to replace the
"\xa0" (dec 160, nbsp char in iso-8859-1) in the string I got from
urllib2.  Yet today, all is fine, no problems whatsoever.  Sadly, I
did not save the exact error message, but I believe it was a
ValueError thrown on string.replace and the message was something to
the effect "character value not within range(128).

Some googling seemed to indicate other people have reported similar
troubles:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2006-July/391617.html

Anyone have any enlightening advice for me?

-- 
Sam Peterson
skpeterson At nospam ucdavis.edu
"if programmers were paid to remove code instead of adding it,
software would be much better" -- unknown