Thanks everyone, I got it working earlier this morning using deelan's suggestion. I modified the code in his link so that it removes rather than replaces the characters.
Also, this was my first experience with unicode and what confused me is that I was thinking of a unicode object as an encoding, but it's not. It's just a series of bytes and you later tell it to use a specific encoding like utf-8 or latin-1. Thanks again for all the help. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
