Replace special characters with ASCII equivalent

Question

Is there any lib that can replace special characters to ASCII equivalents, like:

\"Cześć\"

to:

\"Czesc\"

Answer 1

You can get most of the way by doing:

import unicodedata

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

Unfortunately, there exist accented Latin letters that cannot be decomposed into an ASCII letter + combining marks. You'll have to handle them manually. These include:

• Æ → AE
• Ð → D
• Ø → O
• Þ → TH
• ß → ss
• æ → ae
• ð → d
• ø → o
• þ → th
• Œ → OE
• œ → oe
• ƒ → f