Python 3 is better at saving me from myself

badEncode2.py

 bachmann@jabberwocky  ~  python
Python 2.7.9 (default, Dec 15 2014, 10:34:27)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.0 (clang-600.0.56)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> dog = u"I am\u00A06011000990139424\u00A0creditCard"
>>> type(dog)
<type 'unicode'>
>>> dog.encode('base64')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.9/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/encodings/base64_codec.py", line 24, in base64_encode
    output = base64.encodestring(input)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.9/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/base64.py", line 315, in encodestring
    pieces.append(binascii.b2a_base64(chunk))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)
>>>

badEncode3.py

>>> dog = u"I am\u00A06011000990139424\u00A0creditCard"
>>> type(dog)
<class 'str'>
>>> dog.encode('base64')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
LookupError: 'base64' is not a text encoding; use codecs.encode() to handle arbitrary codecs
>>>