What's a good way to replace international characters with their base Latin counterparts using Python?

Question

Hi there. Say I have the string "blöt träbåt" which has a few a and o with umlaut and ring above. I want it to become "blot trabat" as simply as possibly. I've done some digging and found the following method:

import unicodedata
unicode_string = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', unicode(string))

This will give me the string in unicode format with the international characters split into base letter and combining character (\u0308 for umlauts.) Now to get this back to an ASCII string I could do ascii_string = unicode_string.encode('ASCII', 'ignore') and it'll just ignore the combining characters, resulting in the string "blot trabat".

The question here is: is there a better way to do this? It feels like a roundabout way, and I was thinking there might be something I don't know about. I could of course wrap it up in a helper function, but I'd rather check if this doesn't exist in Python already.

Answer 1

It would be better if you created an explicit table, and then used the unicode.translate method. The advantage would be that transliteration is more precise, e.g. transliterating "ö" to "oe" and "ß" to "ss", as should be done in German.

There are several transliteration packages on PyPI: translitcodec, Unidecode, and trans.