Python Unicode Convert

Convert weird unicode string characters to string:
import unicodedata
unicodedata.normalize('NFKD',unicode_string).encode('ascii','ignore')

Django module for helping convert things to ascii strings:
from django.utils.encoding import smart_str
smart_str('weird string goes here')

Another hack for removing unicode errors:
unicode('my weird string', errors='ignore')


http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html#the-unicode-type