Example Use

from unidecode import unidecode
print unidecode(u"\u5317\u4EB0")

# That prints: Bei Jing

Description

It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but you can't display it -- usually because you're trying to show it to a user via an application that doesn't support Unicode, or because the fonts you need aren't accessible. You could represent the Unicode characters as "???????" or " BA A0q0...", but that's nearly useless to the user who actually wants to read what the text says.

What Unidecode provides is a function, 'unidecode(...)' that takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in ASCII characters (i.e., the universally displayable characters between 0x00 and 0x7F). The representation is almost always an attempt at transliteration -- i.e., conveying, in Roman letters, the pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing system. (See the example above)

This is a Python port of Text::Unidecode Perl module by Sean M. Burke <sburke@cpan.org>.