use string.translate in Python to transliterate Cyrillic?

Question

I\'m getting UnicodeEncodeError: \'ascii\' codec can\'t encode characters in position 0-51: ordinal not in range(128) exception trying to use string.maket

Answer 1

translate behaves differently when used with unicode strings. Instead of a maketrans table, you have to provide a dictionary ord(search)->ord(replace):

symbols = (u"абвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюяАБВГДЕЁЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯ",
           u"abvgdeejzijklmnoprstufhzcss_y_euaABVGDEEJZIJKLMNOPRSTUFHZCSS_Y_EUA")

tr = {ord(a):ord(b) for a, b in zip(*symbols)}

# for Python 2.*:
# tr = dict( [ (ord(a), ord(b)) for (a, b) in zip(*symbols) ] )

text = u'Добрый Ден'
print text.translate(tr)  # looks good

That said, I'd second the suggestion not to reinvent the wheel and to use an established library: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unidecode