title: Remove non-ASCII characters from pandas column
body: <p>I have been trying to work on this issue for a while.I am trying to remove non ASCII characters form DB_user column and trying to replace them with spaces. But I keep getting some errors. This is how my data frame looks:</p>
  
  <pre>
  
  +-----------------------------------------------------------
  |      DB_user                            source   count  |                                             
  +-----------------------------------------------------------
  | ???/"Ò|Z?)?]??C %??J                      A        10   |                                       
  | ?D$ZGU   ;@D??_???T(?)                    B         3   |                                       
  | ?Q`H??M'?Y??KTK$?Ù‹???Ð©JL4??*?_??        C         2   |                                        
  +-----------------------------------------------------------
  
  </pre>
  
  <p>I was using this function, which I had come across while researching the problem on SO.</p>
  
  <pre><code>def filter_func(string):
     for i in range(0,len(string)):
  
  
        if (ord(string[i])&lt; 32 or ord(string[i])&gt;126
             break
  
        return ''
  
  And then using the apply function:
  
  df['DB_user'] = df.apply(filter_func,axis=1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I keep getting the error:</p>
  
  <pre>
  
  'ord() expected a character, but string of length 66 found', u'occurred at index 2'
  </pre>
  
  <p>However, I thought by using the loop in the filter_func function, I was dealing with this by inputing a char into 'ord'. Therefore the moment it hits a non-ASCII character, it should be replaced by a space.</p>
  
  <p>Could somebody help me out?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>