Remove non ascii characters from a string? (in python)

Question

I am trying to parse a string from an HTML file that has multiple lines that have a mix of ascii and non-ascii characters such as this:

"industrial light & \u003cbr\u003emagic, lucasarts"

I have tried to encode the string into ascii using the encode function but it only returns the same value that was put into it.

str = "industrial light & \u003cbr\u003emagic, lucasarts"
str.encode('ascii',errors='ignore')
returns "industrial light & \u003cbr\u003emagic, lucasarts"

Any help woud be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I found the problem. I was trying to decode it in python 2. Python 2 and python 3 handle this kind of conversion differently. Once I tried it in python 3 everything worked fine. Thank you all for your help!