How transliterate unicode text with PyICU to ASCII?

Question

There is the PyICU library, which I understand can be used to transliterate strings. However there are no docs. Anyone have a simple example which transliterates a unicode string to ASCII, with PyICU?

The C++ ICU documentation for transliteration is here, but I don't understand how to call it from Python.

Answer 1

There is a nice cheat sheet for PyICU here: https://gist.github.com/dpk/8325992

Here's a slightly modified example:

>>> import icu
>>> tl = icu.Transliterator.createInstance('Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII')
>>> tl.transliterate('Ψάπφω')
'Psappho'