strip()
strips whitespace from both sides and there is no whitespace to strip from the string you passed in. It's not clear what you hoped would happen or why; probably the proper solution is to fix whatever produced that string in the first place.
If you want to discard \xa0
then ... say so.
x = x.replace('\xa0', '')
If you want to extract only plain printable ASCII from the string, maybe try a regular expression.
import re
x = ' '.join(re.findall('[ -~]+', x))
If you want to strip \u202c
, you can do that too, of course.
x = x.strip('\u202c\u202f')
(I threw in U+202F too just to show that it's easy to do.)
But again, the unholy mix of raw bytes and Unicode in your input string is likely a sign of corruption earlier in your processing. If you can fix that, maybe you will no longer need any of these.