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

Try simple character replacement

str1 = "“I am the greatest”, said Gavin O’Connor"
print(str1)
print(str1.replace("’", "'").replace("“","\"").replace("”","\""))

PS: add # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- to the top of your .py file if you get error