We may always need to do the unexpected, including going from Unicode to ASCII. We take a look at how to accomplish this in Python.
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Sometimes you need to downgrade Unicode text to more restricted ASCII text. For example, while working on my previous post, I was surprised that there didn’t appear to be an asteroid named after Poincaré. There is one, but it was listed as Poincare in my list of asteroid names.
I used the Python module unidecode to convert names to ASCII before searching, and that fixed the problem. Here’s a small example showing how the code works.
This produces:
Installing the unidecode module also installs a command line utility by the same name. So you could, for example, pipe text to that utility.
I titled this post “Projecting Unicode to ASCII” because this code is a projection in the mathematical sense.
