Question

I would like to change all accented characters into non-accented characters:

 conversion_dict = {"ä": "a", "ö": "o", "ü": "u","Ä": "A", "Ö": "O", "Ü": "U",
                   "á": "a", "à": "a", "â": "a", "é": "e", "è": "e", "ê": "e",
                   "ú": "u", "ù": "u", "û": "u", "ó": "o", "ò": "o", "ô": "o",
                   "Á": "A", "À": "A", "Â": "A", "É": "E", "È": "E", "Ê": "E",
                   "Ú": "U", "Ù": "U", "Û": "U", "Ó": "O", "Ò": "O", "Ô": "O","ß": "s"}

Is there a way to do something like "paragraph of text".replace([conversion_dict])?

Answer 1

preferred method using third-party module

A much better alternative than the method below is to use the awesome unidecode module:

>>> import unidecode
>>> somestring = u"äüÊÂ"
>>> unidecode.unidecode(somestring)
'auEA'

built-in, slightly-hazardous method

Inferring from your question that you are looking to normalize unicode characters, there is actually a nice, built-in way to do this:

>>> somestring = u"äüÊÂ"
>>> somestring
u'\xe4\xfc\xca\xc2'
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', somestring).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
'auEA'

Check out the documentation for unicodedata.normalize.

Note, however, that there might be some issues with this. See this post for a nice explanation and some workarounds.

See also, latin-1-to-ascii for alternatives.