Question

I have some Python code that’s receiving a string with bad unicode in it. When I try to ignore the bad characters, Python still chokes (version 2.6.1). Here’s how to reproduce it:

s = 'ad\xc2-ven\xc2-ture'
s.encode('utf8', 'ignore')

It throws

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Converting a string to a unicode instance is str.decode() in Python 2.x:

 >>> s.decode("ascii", "ignore")
 u'ad-ven-ture'