String slugification in Python

Question

I am in search of the best way to \"slugify\" string what \"slug\" is, and my current solution is based on this recipe

I have changed it a little bit to:

<         


        

Answer 1

The problem is with the ascii normalization line:

slug = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', s)

It is called unicode normalization which does not decompose lots of characters to ascii. For example, it would strip non-ascii characters from the following strings:

Mørdag -> mrdag
Æther -> ther

A better way to do it is to use the unidecode module that tries to transliterate strings to ascii. So if you replace the above line with:

import unidecode
slug = unidecode.unidecode(s)

You get better results for the above strings and for many Greek and Russian characters too:

Mørdag -> mordag
Æther -> aether