Replace special characters with ASCII equivalent

You can get most of the way by doing:

import unicodedata

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

Unfortunately, there exist accented Latin letters that cannot be decomposed into an ASCII letter + combining marks. You'll have to handle them manually. These include:

• Æ → AE
• Ð → D
• Ø → O
• Þ → TH
• ß → ss
• æ → ae
• ð → d
• ø → o
• þ → th
• Œ → OE
• œ → oe
• ƒ → f

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import unicodedata
text = u'Cześć'
print unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text).encode('ascii', 'ignore')