Is there a way to convert umlauts to their ascii equivalent? [duplicate]

Question

I have a Unicode string in Python, and I would like to remove all the accents (diacritics).

I found on the web an elegant way to do this (in Java):

1. convert the Unicode string to its long normalized form (with a separate character for letters and diacritics)
2. remove all the characters whose Unicode type is "diacritic".

Do I need to install a library such as pyICU or is this possible with just the Python standard library? And what about python 3?

Important note: I would like to avoid code with an explicit mapping from accented characters to their non-accented counterpart.

Answer 1

Unidecode is the correct answer for this. It transliterates any unicode string into the closest possible representation in ascii text.

Example:

>>> from unidecode import unidecode
>>> unidecode('kožušček')
'kozuscek'
>>> unidecode('北亰')
'Bei Jing '
>>> unidecode('François')
'Francois'