title: How to escape a unicode error when converting a BeautifulSoup object to a string
body: <p>I have been working with the following bit of code, attempting to extract the text elements of this webpage. </p>
  
  <pre><code>site= 'http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f1/1785/4/team?&amp;week=4'
  print site
  response = urllib2.urlopen(site)
  html = response.read()
  
  soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
  position = soup.find_all('span', class_="Fz-xxs")
  for j in range(0,13):
      positionlist = str(position[j].get_text())
  
  print (positionlist)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, the text itself that is being put into the positionlist string contains many hyphens (ie: SEA-RB) that are not able to be encoded. When I attempt to run the code as it is I get the following response:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/Users/masongardner/Desktop/TestSorter.py", line 20, in &lt;module&gt;
      positionlist = str(position[j].get_text())
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ue002' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am aware that the hyphen cannot be encoded, but I am not sure how to change the coding so that I can have unicode interpret the hyphen if possible, or otherwise ignore the hyphen and just encode the text before and after for each instance. This project is purely for my own use, and so a hackerish approach is not a problem!</p>
  
  <p>Thanks Everyone!</p>