how to convert characters like these,"a³ a¡ a´a§" in unicode, using python?

Question

i'm making a crawler to get text html inside, i'm using beautifulsoup.

when I open the url using urllib2, this library converts automatically the html that was using portuguese accents like " ã ó é õ " in another characters like these "a³ a¡ a´a§"

what I want is just get the words without accents

contrã¡rio -> contrario

I tried to use this algoritm, bu this one just works when the text uses words like these "olá coração contrário"

   def strip_accents(s):
      return ''.join((c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', s) if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn'))

Answer 1

Firstly, you have to ensure that your crawler returns HTML that is unicode text (Eg. Scrapy has a method response.body_as_unicode() that does exactly this)

Once you have unicode text that you cant make sense of, the step of going from unicode text to equivalent ascii text lies here - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unidecode/0.04.1

from unidecode import unidecode
print unidecode(u"\u5317\u4EB0")

The output is "Bei Jing"