What is the best way to remove accents (normalize) 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):

1. conve

Answer 1

In response to @MiniQuark's answer:

I was trying to read in a csv file that was half-French (containing accents) and also some strings which would eventually become integers and floats. As a test, I created a test.txt file that looked like this:

Montréal, über, 12.89, Mère, Françoise, noël, 889

I had to include lines 2 and 3 to get it to work (which I found in a python ticket), as well as incorporate @Jabba's comment:

import sys 
reload(sys) 
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")
import csv
import unicodedata

def remove_accents(input_str):
    nkfd_form = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', unicode(input_str))
    return u"".join([c for c in nkfd_form if not unicodedata.combining(c)])

with open('test.txt') as f:
    read = csv.reader(f)
    for row in read:
        for element in row:
            print remove_accents(element)

The result:

Montreal
uber
12.89
Mere
Francoise
noel
889

(Note: I am on Mac OS X 10.8.4 and using Python 2.7.3)