What do you mean by "ansi string"? Here is a superficially not-unreasonable answer to your more specific question:
# >>> s1 = u'\xd6\xd0\xb9\xfa\xca\xaf\xbb\xaf(600028) ' # >>> s2 = '\xd6\xd0\xb9\xfa\xca\xaf\xbb\xaf(600028) ' # >>> s3 = s1.encode('latin1') # >>> s2 == s3 # True But what are you really trying to achieve? Where does your Unicode data come from? What ranges of characters do you expect it to contain? You need to crunch it into an 8-bit representation because ... what? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list