Compare 2 strings without considering accents in Python

You should take a look at Unidecode. With the module and this method, you can get a string without accent and then make your comparaison:

def remove_accents(data):
    return ''.join(x for x in unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', data) if x in string.ascii_letters).lower()


if remove_accents('séquoia') in 'Mon sequoia est vert':
    # Do something
    pass

Reference from stackoverflow

You should use unidecode function from Unidecode package:

from unidecode import unidecode

if unidecode(u'séquoia') in 'Mon sequoia est vert':
    print 'Bonjour'

(sorry, late to the party!!)

How about instead, doing this:

>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', u'î ï í ī į ì').encode('ASCII', 'ignore')
'i i i i i i'

No need to loop over anything. @Maxime Lorant answer is very inefficient.

>>> import timeit
>>> code = """
import string, unicodedata
def remove_accents(data):
    return ''.join(x for x in unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', data) if x in string.ascii_letters).lower()
"""
>>> timeit.timeit("remove_accents(u'séquoia')", setup=code)
3.6028339862823486
>>> timeit.timeit("unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', u'séquoia').encode('ASCII', 'ignore')", setup='import unicodedata')
0.7447490692138672

Hint: less is better

Also, I'm sure the package unidecode @Seur suggested has other advantages, but it is still very slow compared to the native option that requires no 3rd party libraries.

>>> timeit.timeit("unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', u'séquoia').encode('ASCII', 'ignore')", setup="import unicodedata")
0.7662729263305664
>>> timeit.timeit("unidecode.unidecode(u'séquoia')", setup="import unidecode")
7.489392042160034

Hint: less is better

Putting it all together:

clean_text = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', u'séquoia').encode('ASCII', 'ignore')
if clean_text in 'Mon sequoia est vert':
    ...