Approximately converting unicode string to ascii string in python

Question

don\'t know wether this is trivial or not, but I\'d need to convert an unicode string to ascii string, and I wouldn\'t like to have all those escape chars around. I mean, is

Answer 1

import unicodedata

unicode_string = u"Gavin O’Connor"
print unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', unicode_string).encode('ascii','ignore')

Output:

Gavin O'Connor

Here's the document that describes the normalization forms: http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/