I wrote the following to fix the nuisance non-ascii quotes and force conversion to something usable.
unicodeToAsciiMap = {u'\u2019':"'", u'\u2018':"`", }
def unicodeToAscii(inStr):
try:
return str(inStr)
except:
pass
outStr = ""
for i in inStr:
try:
outStr = outStr + str(i)
except:
if unicodeToAsciiMap.has_key(i):
outStr = outStr + unicodeToAsciiMap[i]
else:
try:
print "unicodeToAscii: add to map:", i, repr(i), "(encoded as _)"
except:
print "unicodeToAscii: unknown code (encoded as _)", repr(i)
outStr = outStr + "_"
return outStr