Question: i have a string "Mikael Håfström" which contains some special characters how do i remove this using python?

Answer: 
For example using the encode method: `u"Mikael Håfström".encode("ascii", "ignore")`
See this [effbot article](http://effbot.org/zone/unicode-convert.htm) (includes code). It makes reasonable transliterations into ASCII characters where possible. It is possible to extend the built-in conversion table to handle many other characters (e.g. those used in Eastern European languages) that don't have a canonical decomposition.