remove unicode characters from string python

string_unicode = " Python is easy \u200c to learn. "
string_encode = string_unicode.encode("ascii", "ignore")
string_decode = string_encode.decode()
print(string_decode)

def strip_non_ascii(string):
    ''' Returns the string without non ASCII characters'''
    stripped = (c for c in string if 0 < ord(c) < 127)
    return ''.join(stripped)


test = u'éáé123456tgreáé@€'
print test
print strip_non_ascii(test)

return ''.join([i if ord(i) < 128 else ' ' for i in text])