title: How to convert utf-8 fancy quotes to neutral quotes
body: <p>I'm writing a little Python script that parses word docs and writes to a csv file. However, some of the docs have some utf-8 characters that my script can't process correctly.</p>
  
  <p>Fancy quotes show up quite often (u'\u201c'). Is there a quick and easy (and smart) way of replacing those with the neutral ascii-supported quotes, so I can just write <code>line.encode('ascii')</code> to the csv file?</p>
  
  <p>I have tried to find the left quote and replace it:</p>
  
  <pre><code>val = line.find(u'\u201c')
  if val &gt;= 0: line[val] = '"'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But to no avail:</p>
  
  <p><code>TypeError: 'unicode' object does not support item assignment</code></p>
  
  <p>Is what I've described a good strategy? Or should I just set up the csv to support utf-8 (though I'm not sure if the application that will be reading the CSV wants utf-8)?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you</p>