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

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))