title: Unicode HTML Conversion to ASCII in Python
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5555063/unescaping-characters-in-a-string-with-python">Unescaping Characters in a String with Python</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>I have a string of unicode HTML in Python which begins with: <code>\u003ctable&gt;\u003ctr</code>
  I need to convert this to ascii so I can then parse it with BeautifulSoup. However, Python's encode and decode functions seem to have no effect; I get the original string no matter what I try. I'm new to Python and unicode in general, so help would be much appreciated.</p>