html = lxml.html.fromstring(
    '<div><!-- word style><bleep><omgz 1,000 tags><--><p>It\xc2\x92s a spicy meatball!</div>'
    )
html = clean_html(html)
result = lxml.html.tostring(html, encoding='ascii')
Using python to edit html, but lxml converts nice html entities to strange encoding