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

There is a technique to strip accents from characters, but other characters need to be directly replaced. Check this article: http://effbot.org/zone/unicode-convert.htm

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

b = str(a.encode('utf-8').decode('ascii', 'ignore'))

should work fine.

Answer 4

Use the Unidecode package to transliterate the string.

>>> import unidecode
>>> unidecode.unidecode(u'Gavin O’Connor')
"Gavin O'Connor"

Answer 5

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/