How to implement Unicode string matching by folding in python

Question

I have an application implementing incremental search. I have a catalog of unicode strings to be matched and match them to a given \"key\" string; a catalog string is a \"hi

Answer 1

You can use this strip_accents function to remove the accents:

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

>>> strip_accents(u'Östblocket')
'Ostblocket'