Replace non-ASCII characters with a single space

If the replacement character can be '?' instead of a space, then I'd suggest result = text.encode('ascii', 'replace').decode():

"""Test the performance of different non-ASCII replacement methods."""


import re
from timeit import timeit


# 10_000 is typical in the project that I'm working on and most of the text
# is going to be non-ASCII.
text = 'Æ' * 10_000


print(timeit(
    """
result = ''.join([c if ord(c) < 128 else '?' for c in text])
    """,
    number=1000,
    globals=globals(),
))

print(timeit(
    """
result = text.encode('ascii', 'replace').decode()
    """,
    number=1000,
    globals=globals(),
))

Results:

0.7208260721400134
0.009975979187503592

Your ''.join() expression is filtering, removing anything non-ASCII; you could use a conditional expression instead:

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

This handles characters one by one and would still use one space per character replaced.

Your regular expression should just replace consecutive non-ASCII characters with a space:

re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7F]+',' ', text)

Note the + there.

For you the get the most alike representation of your original string I recommend the unidecode module:

# python 2.x:
from unidecode import unidecode
def remove_non_ascii(text):
    return unidecode(unicode(text, encoding = "utf-8"))

Then you can use it in a string:

remove_non_ascii("Ceñía")
Cenia

For character processing, use Unicode strings:

PythonWin 3.3.0 (v3.3.0:bd8afb90ebf2, Sep 29 2012, 10:57:17) [MSC v.1600 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32.
>>> s='ABC马克def'
>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',s)   # Each char is a Unicode codepoint.
'ABC  def'
>>> b = s.encode('utf8')
>>> re.sub(rb'[^\x00-\x7f]',rb' ',b) # Each char is a 3-byte UTF-8 sequence.
b'ABC      def'

But note you will still have a problem if your string contains decomposed Unicode characters (separate character and combining accent marks, for example):

>>> s = 'mañana'
>>> len(s)
6
>>> import unicodedata as ud
>>> n=ud.normalize('NFD',s)
>>> n
'mañana'
>>> len(n)
7
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',s) # single codepoint
'ma ana'
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',n) # only combining mark replaced
'man ana'