What is the best way to remove accents with Apache Spark dataframes in PySpark?

Question

I need to delete accents from characters in Spanish and others languages from different datasets.

I already did a function based in the code provided in this post t

Answer 1

Another way for doing using python Unicode Database :

import unicodedata
import sys

from pyspark.sql.functions import translate, regexp_replace

def make_trans():
    matching_string = ""
    replace_string = ""

    for i in range(ord(" "), sys.maxunicode):
        name = unicodedata.name(chr(i), "")
        if "WITH" in name:
            try:
                base = unicodedata.lookup(name.split(" WITH")[0])
                matching_string += chr(i)
                replace_string += base
            except KeyError:
                pass

    return matching_string, replace_string

def clean_text(c):
    matching_string, replace_string = make_trans()
    return translate(
        regexp_replace(c, "\p{M}", ""), 
        matching_string, replace_string
    ).alias(c)

So now let's test it :

df = sc.parallelize([
(1, "Maracaibó"), (2, "New York"),
(3, "   São Paulo   "), (4, "~Madrid"),
(5, "São Paulo"), (6, "Maracaibó")
]).toDF(["id", "text"])

df.select(clean_text("text")).show()
## +---------------+
## |           text|
## +---------------+
## |      Maracaibo|
## |       New York|
## |   Sao Paulo   |
## |        ~Madrid|
## |      Sao Paulo|
## |      Maracaibo|
## +---------------+

acknowledge @zero323