Python script to convert from UTF-8 to ASCII [duplicate]

Question

I'm trying to write a script in python to convert utf-8 files into ASCII files:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# *-* coding: iso-8859-1 *-*

import sys
import os

filePath = "test.lrc"
fichier = open(filePath, "rb")
contentOfFile = fichier.read()
fichier.close()

fichierTemp = open("tempASCII", "w")
fichierTemp.write(contentOfFile.encode("ASCII", 'ignore'))
fichierTemp.close()

When I run this script I have the following error :

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 13: ordinal not in range(128)

I thought that can ignore error with the ignore parameter in the encode method. But it seems not.

I'm open to other ways to convert.

Answer 1

data="UTF-8 DATA"
udata=data.decode("utf-8")
asciidata=udata.encode("ascii","ignore")

Answer 2

import codecs

 ...

fichier = codecs.open(filePath, "r", encoding="utf-8")

 ...

fichierTemp = codecs.open("tempASCII", "w", encoding="ascii", errors="ignore")
fichierTemp.write(contentOfFile)

 ...

Answer 3

UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII. Either your UTF-8 file is ASCII, or it can't be converted without loss.