[Python] Convert Unicode to ASCII without errors in Python

My code just scrapes a web page, then converts it to Unicode.

html = urllib.urlopen(link).read()
html.encode("utf8","ignore")
self.response.out.write(html)


But I get a UnicodeDecodeError:


Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 507, in __call__
handler.get(*groups)
File "/Users/greg/clounce/main.py", line 55, in get
html.encode("utf8","ignore")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 2818: ordinal not in range(128)


I assume that means the HTML contains some wrongly-formed attempt at Unicode somewhere. Can I just drop whatever code bytes are causing the problem instead of getting an error?

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