title: Pandas convert dataframe to Utf-8
body: <p>I have a <code>df</code> that consist of 100 rows and 24 columns. The column type is string. It's throwing me the following error when I tried to append the data frame to KDB</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xd3' in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here is an example of the first row in my df.</p>
  
  <pre><code>                        AnnouncementDate AuctionDate    BBT  \
  _id
  00000067   2012-12-11T00:00:00.000+00:00         NaN   FHLB
  
             CouponDividendRate DaysToSettle  \
  _id
  00000067                 0.61            1
  
                                          Description  \
  _id
  00000067                         FHLB 0.61 12/28/16
  
                       FirstSettlementDate           ISN IsAgency IsWhenIssued  \
  _id
  00000067   2012-12-28T00:00:00.000+00:00  US313381K796     True        False
  
  
             ...  OnTheRunTreasury OperationalIndicator  \
  _id        ...
  00000067   ...               NaN                False
  
  
            OriginalAmountOfPrincipal OriginalMaturityDate  \
  _id
  00000067                 13000000.0                  NaN
  
  
            PrincipalAmountOutstanding       SCSP       SMCP  \
  _id
  00000067                         0.0  313381K79   76000000
  
             SecurityTypeLevel1 SecurityTypeLevel2   TCK
  _id
  00000067          US-DOMESTIC                NaN   NaN
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My question is, is there an easy way to convert my <code>df</code> to utf-8 format? </p>
  
  <p>Possibly something like <code>df = df.encode('utf-8')</code></p>
  
  <p>Thanks </p>