How to replace unicode characters in string with something else python?

I have a string that I got from reading a HTML webpage with bullets that have a symbol like "•" because of the bulleted list. Note that the text is an HTML source from a webpage using Python 2.7's urllib2.read(webaddress).



I know the unicode character for the bullet character as U+2022, but how do I actually replace that unicode character with something else?



I tried doing
str.replace("•", "something")



but it does not appear to work... how do I do this?