title: How can encode('ascii', 'ignore') throw a UnicodeDecodeError?
body: <p>This line</p>
  
  <pre><code>data = get_url_contents(r[0]).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>produces this error</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 11450: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why? I assumed that because I'm using 'ignore' that it should be impossible to have decode errors when saving the output to a value to a string variable.</p>