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:

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

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

Some languages have combining diacritics as language letters and accent diacritics to specify accent.

I think it is more safe to specify explicitly what diactrics you want to strip:

def strip_accents(string, accents=('COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT', 'COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT', 'COMBINING TILDE')):
    accents = set(map(unicodedata.lookup, accents))
    chars = [c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', string) if c not in accents]
    return unicodedata.normalize('NFC', ''.join(chars))

Thank You!!