title: How to remove all instances of any emoji from a twitter post in Python 2.7
body: <p>I'm working on a project that gets tweets from twitter using tweepy and processes the text. The problem that I am having is that I can't have any emoji's, special characters, etc.. Unfortunately one of the libraries that I am using doesn't support python 3 so I have to use python 2.7. Is there any way to remove everything except the "human readable text". I have been using the ftfy library but I still get stuff like this:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>∩┐╜∩┐╜</li>
  <li><h1>φï░φîî∞▒ù</h1></li>
  <li>ï¿½ï¿½</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>my code:
  </p>
  
  <pre><code>import tweepy
  from ftfy import fix_text,fix_encoding
  from requests.exceptions import ConnectionError
  from requests.packages.urllib3.exceptions import ProtocolError,ReadTimeoutError
  import time
  import exceptions
  
  consumer_key = '...'
  consumer_secret = '...'
  
  access_token = '...'
  access_token_secret = '...'
  
  auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
  auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
  
  
  
  class MyStreamListener(tweepy.StreamListener):
      def on_connect(self):
          print 'Connected'
      def on_status(self, status):
          fixed_text = fix_text(fix_encoding(status.text)).encode('utf-8')
          print fixed_text
          return True
      def on_error(self, status):
          print status
          return False
  
  
  running = True
  while running is True:
      try:
          print 'Connecting'
          myStreamListener = MyStreamListener()
          myStream = tweepy.Stream(auth=auth,listener=myStreamListener)
          myStream.filter(track=['python'])
      except ConnectionError:
          print 'Connection Error: Waiting 10 seconds before retrying'
          time.sleep(10)
      except ProtocolError:
          print 'ProtocolError: Waiting 10 seconds before retrying'
          time.sleep(10)
      except ReadTimeoutError:
          print 'Read Timeout Error: Waiting 10 seconds before retrying'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>note: this is just my test script to learn how to take tweets from twitter and print them</p>