[Tutor] changing unicode to ascii

[Benjamin Fishbein]

I was trying to write text to a file and got the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 5495: ordinal not in range(128)

I tried several things I found online, such as:
text.encode("ascii", "ignore")
which gave me the same error

and
text.replace("\xa0", "")

again, UnicodeEncodeError

I tried
text.decode("ascii", "ignore")
and got the same result.

I'm using Python 2.7, so there's some special technique for this version?
I think the utf-8 data is unnecessary; I can strip it if I can't convert it to ascii.
Of course, I can't figure out how to strip it either.
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Ben

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