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

I did it this way:

POLISH_CHARACTERS = {
    50309:'a',50311:'c',50329:'e',50562:'l',50564:'n',50099:'o',50587:'s',50618:'z',50620:'z',
    50308:'A',50310:'C',50328:'E',50561:'L',50563:'N',50067:'O',50586:'S',50617:'Z',50619:'Z',}

def encodePL(text):
    nrmtxt = unicodedata.normalize('NFC',text)
    i = 0
    ret_str = []
    while i < len(nrmtxt):
        if ord(text[i])>128: # non ASCII character
            fbyte = ord(text[i])
            sbyte = ord(text[i+1])
            lkey = (fbyte << 8) + sbyte
            ret_str.append(POLISH_CHARACTERS.get(lkey))
            i = i+1
        else: # pure ASCII character
            ret_str.append(text[i])
        i = i+1
    return ''.join(ret_str)

when executed:

encodePL(u'ąćęłńóśźż ĄĆĘŁŃÓŚŹŻ')

it will produce output like this:

u'acelnoszz ACELNOSZZ'

This works fine for me - ;D