How to replace unicode characters by ascii characters in Python (perl script given)?

Question

I am trying to learn python and couldn't figure out how to translate the following perl script to python:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w                     

use open qw(:std :utf8);

while(<>) {
  s/\x{00E4}/ae/;
  s/\x{00F6}/oe/;
  s/\x{00FC}/ue/;
  print;
}

The script just changes unicode umlauts to alternative ascii output. (So the complete output is in ascii.) I would be grateful for any hints. Thanks!

Answer 1

For converting to ASCII you might want to try ASCII, Dammit or this recipe, which boils down to:

>>> title = u"Klüft skräms inför på fédéral électoral große"
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', title).encode('ascii','ignore')
'Kluft skrams infor pa federal electoral groe'