losing characters when going from unicode to ascii

y0 I have this problem that characters that include ñ or ŕ í á ú etc are discarded when I apply

text = text.encode('ascii', 'ignore')

to a function that needs the input to be ascii.

is there a way to force it to ascii without losing those characters or should I change the function to accept unicode charact开发者_运维技巧ers?

http://dpaste.com/601417/

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The 'ascii' encoding can't represent the characters you refer to. You have to choose a different encoding — perhaps 'cp850' or 'latin_1' — but then you have to be sure that your output terminal interprets 8-bit codes using the relevant code page.

On balance, life is easier if you just go Unicode all the way.

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Yes, you should go for another encoding, if you need those characters (for example Unicode). See ascii table for all chars that are included in ascii.