title: string encoding and decoding?
body: <p>Here are my attempts with error messages. What am I doing wrong?</p>
  
  <pre><code>string.decode("ascii", "ignore")
  </code></pre>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in
    position 37: ordinal not in range(128)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <pre><code>string.encode('utf-8', "ignore")
  </code></pre>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position
    37: ordinal not in range(128)</p>
  </blockquote>