I am reading the contents of a file and one of the characters is an unknown character. I copied the part of the file that had this unknown character to my text editor and created the following script. I uploaded an image of the script because I'm not able to paste this character on SO, it shows up empty. The unknown character is '<0x01>' in the image. What is this character? What is the proper way to remove this character and other characters like them?
x = "<0x01> hello"
print x.decode('utf-8', 'ignore')
print x.replace("<0x01>", "")
Python 2.7.6
Ubuntu 14.04