What is the best way to remove accents in a Python unicode string?

Question

I have a Unicode string in Python, and I would like to remove all the accents (diacritics).

I found on the Web an elegant way to do this in Java:

1. convert the Unicode string to its long normalized form (with a separate character for letters and diacritics)

2. remove all the characters whose Unicode type is "diacritic".

Do I need to install a library such as pyICU or is this possible with just the python standard library? And what about python 3?

Important note: I would like to avoid code with an explicit mapping from accented characters to their non-accented counterpart.

Answer 1

The best way to remove accents in a Python Unicode string is to Unidecode, it is the correct answer for this. It renders any Unicode string into the closest possible representation in ASCII text.

An example that illustrates the use of unidecode:-

from unidecode import unidecode

accented_string = u'Málaga'

unaccented_string = unidecode.unidecode(accented_string)

For more information, kindly refer to our Python course.