title: Python 2.7 - finding UTF-8 characters
body: <pre><code>from urllib import urlopen
  web = urlopen("http://typographyforlawyers.com/straight-and-curly-
  quotes.html").read()
  web = web.replace("\xe2\x80\x9c".decode('utf8'), '"')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>"\xe2\x80\x9c" is the UTF-8 character for curly quotes. When I try to find curly quotes in a website using this code, I get this error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "&lt;pyshell#4&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
  web = web.replace("\xe2\x80\x9c".decode('utf8'), '"')
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 2265: 
  ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What does this error mean, what am I doing wrong, and how do I fix it?</p>