Unidefy -- substitute unicode for ascii equivalents, if available
I wrote this primarily to normalize certain data for searching, the problem is that
certain characters, like the umlat, are hard to do on a normal keyboard, and so most
people don't bother, so this module can be used on the indexed strings to allow
either a u or an umlat to be used (since the u wouldn't be changed and the umlat would
be changed to the u) so you can search both ways but only have to store one version.
There are other modules that help with this, but python's builtin unicodedata didn't quite
do what I needed since it only uses defined unicode normalizations,
and something like unidecode works
but it's a little too eager, getting rid of unicode chars it doesn't recognize. I wanted to keep unicode that there wasn't
a good substitution for, likewise, I didn't really want to turn chinese characters into english
either (something unidecode does), it's definitely worth a look if you want more aggressive substitution.
To install, use Pip:
pip install git+https://github.com/Jaymon/unidefy#egg=unidefy
More reading, if you're interested
This is a dump of all the links I had open/used while I wrote this module
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12944678/using-unicodedata-normalize-in-python-2-7
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/251871/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/816285/where-is-pythons-best-ascii-for-this-unicode-database
http://lexsrv3.nlm.nih.gov/LexSysGroup/Projects/lvg/current/docs/designDoc/UDF/unicode/unicode.html
http://lexsrv3.nlm.nih.gov/LexSysGroup/Projects/lvg/current/docs/designDoc/UDF/unicode/
http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Text-Unidecode-0.04/lib/Text/Unidecode.pm
http://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2009/01/unicode_transliteration_in_python/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4808967/replacing-unicode-punctuation-with-ascii-approximations
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138449/how-to-convert-a-unicode-character-to-its-ascii-equivalent
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5651124/is-there-a-way-to-dumb-down-text-from-unicode-to-ascii
I got the data for the substitution table from these locations
http://unicode.org/repos/cldr/trunk/common/transforms/Latin-ASCII.xml