convert accented characters to normal python

1# Answer written by Eswara Moorthy and edited by Igor Chubin and
2# Saurabh Bhandari on StackOverflow.com
3# (https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/44433664/4).
4# Licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0
5# (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
6import unicodedata
7
8def strip_accents(text):
9
10    try:
11        text = unicode(text, 'utf-8')
12    except NameError: # unicode is a default on python 3 
13        pass
14
15    text = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text)\
16           .encode('ascii', 'ignore')\
17           .decode("utf-8")
18    return str(text)
19
20
21s = strip_accents('àéêöhello')
22
23print s

1def simplify(text):
2	import unicodedata
3	try:
4		text = unicode(text, 'utf-8')
5	except NameError:
6		pass
7	text = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text).encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode("utf-8")
8	return str(text)