How to remove accents from values in columns?

Question

How do I change the special characters to the usual alphabet letters? This is my dataframe:

In [56]: cities
Out[56]:

Table Code  Country         Year                


        

Answer 1

With pandas series example

def remove_accents(a):
    return unidecode.unidecode(a.decode('utf-8'))

df['column'] = df['column'].apply(remove_accents)

in this case decode asciis