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

Solution 1:

Unidecode is the correct answer for this. It transliterates any unicode string into the closest possible representation in ascii text.

Example:

accented_string = u'Málaga'
# accented_string is of type 'unicode'
import unidecode
unaccented_string = unidecode.unidecode(accented_string)
# unaccented_string contains 'Malaga'and is of type 'str'

Solution 2:

How about this:

import unicodedata
def strip_accents(s):
   return ''.join(c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', s)
                  if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn')

This works on greek letters, too:

>>> strip_accents(u"A \u00c0 \u0394 \u038E")
u'A A \u0394 \u03a5'
>>> 

The character category "Mn" stands for Nonspacing_Mark, which is similar to unicodedata.combining in MiniQuark's answer (I didn't think of unicodedata.combining, but it is probably the better solution, because it's more explicit).

And keep in mind, these manipulations may significantly alter the meaning of the text. Accents, Umlauts etc. are not "decoration".