Remove accented characters form string - Python

Question

I get some data from a webpage and read it like this in python

origional_doc = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()

Sometimes this url has characters su

Answer 1

This should work. It will eliminate all characters that are not ascii.

    original_doc = (original_doc.decode('unicode_escape').encode('ascii','ignore'))

Answer 2

using re you can sub all characters that are in a certain hexadecimal ascii range.

>>> re.sub('[\x80-\xFF]','','é and ä and ect')
' and  and ect'

You can also do the inverse and sub anything thats NOT in the basic 128 characters:

>>> re.sub('[^\x00-\x7F]','','é and ä and ect')
' and  and ect'