Removing non-ascii characters from any given stringtype in Python

Question

>>> teststring = \'aõ\'
>>> type(teststring)

>>> teststring
\'a\\xf5\'
>>> print teststring
aõ
>>> test         


        

Answer 1

Why did the decode("ascii") give out a unicode string?

Because that's what decode is for: it decodes byte strings like your ASCII one into unicode.

In your second example, you're trying to "decode" a string which is already unicode, which has no effect. To print it to your terminal, though, Python must encode it as your default encoding, which is ASCII - but because you haven't done that step explicitly and therefore haven't specified the 'ignore' parameter, it raises the error that it can't encode the non-ASCII characters.

The trick to all of this is remembering that decode takes an encoded bytestring and converts it to Unicode, and encode does the reverse. It might be easier if you understand that Unicode is not an encoding.