How to convert utf-8 fancy quotes to neutral quotes

Question

I\'m writing a little Python script that parses word docs and writes to a csv file. However, some of the docs have some utf-8 characters that my script can\'t process correc

Answer 1

You can use the Unidecode package to automatically convert all Unicode characters to their nearest pure ASCII equivalent.

from unidecode import unidecode
line = unidecode(line)

This will handle both directions of double quotes as well as single quotes, em dashes, and other things that you probably haven't discovered yet.

Answer 2

You can't assign to a string, as they are immutable, and can't be changed.

You can, however, just use the regex library, which might be the most flexible way to do this:

import re
newline = re.sub(u'\u201c','"',line)