python remove accents without unidecode code example

Example 1: convert accented characters to normal python

# Answer written by Eswara Moorthy and edited by Igor Chubin and
# Saurabh Bhandari on StackOverflow.com
# (https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/44433664/4).
# Licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0
# (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
import unicodedata

def strip_accents(text):

    try:
        text = unicode(text, 'utf-8')
    except NameError: # unicode is a default on python 3 
        pass

    text = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text)\
           .encode('ascii', 'ignore')\
           .decode("utf-8")
    return str(text)


s = strip_accents('àéêöhello')

print s

Example 2: unicodedata no accent

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