Replace special characters in python

Question

I have some text coming from the web as such:

£6.49

Obviously I would like this to be displayed as:

£6.49

I have tried the following so far:

Answer 1

Edit: you have your objects already in unicode. Seems to me there is no reason to actually use enocde/decode at all.

>>> print u'Oscar Winners Best Pictures Box Set \xc2\xa36.49'.replace(u'Â','')
Oscar Winners Best Pictures Box Set £6.49

However it seems to me that something is wrong there. The unicode objects are actually not unicode; see:

>>> print 'Oscar Winners Best Pictures Box Set \xc2\xa36.49'.decode('utf8')
Oscar Winners Best Pictures Box Set £6.49

The repr() you posted should not be unicode object. That's why I was asking where are you getting the data, there is something wrong.