Normalizing unicode text to filenames, etc. in Python

Question

Are there any standalonenish solutions for normalizing international unicode text to safe ids and filenames in Python?

E.g. turn My International Text: åäö

Answer 1

The following will remove accents from whatever characters Unicode can decompose into combining pairs, discard any weird characters it can't, and nuke whitespace:

# encoding: utf-8
from unicodedata import normalize
import re

original = u'ľ š č ť ž ý á í é'
decomposed = normalize("NFKD", original)
no_accent = ''.join(c for c in decomposed if ord(c)<0x7f)
no_spaces = re.sub(r'\s', '_', no_accent)

print no_spaces
# output: l_s_c_t_z_y_a_i_e

It doesn't try to get rid of characters disallowed on filesystems, but you can steal DANGEROUS_CHARS_REGEX from the file you linked for that.