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'

Answer 2

• Use the fileinput module to loop over standard input or a list of files,
• decode the lines you read from UTF-8 to unicode objects
• then map any unicode characters you desire with the translate method

translit.py would look like this:

#!/usr/bin/env python2.6
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import fileinput

table = {
          0xe4: u'ae',
          ord(u'ö'): u'oe',
          ord(u'ü'): u'ue',
          ord(u'ß'): None,
        }

for line in fileinput.input():
    s = line.decode('utf8')
    print s.translate(table), 

And you could use it like this:

$ cat utf8.txt 
sömé täßt
sömé täßt
sömé täßt

$ ./translit.py utf8.txt 
soemé taet
soemé taet
soemé taet

• Update:

In case you are using python 3 strings are by default unicode and you dont' need to encode it if it contains non-ASCII characters or even a non-Latin characters. So the solution will look as follow:

line = 'Verhältnismäßigkeit, Möglichkeit'

table = {
         ord('ä'): 'ae',
         ord('ö'): 'oe',
         ord('ü'): 'ue',
         ord('ß'): 'ss',
       }

line.translate(table)

>>> 'Verhaeltnismaessigkeit, Moeglichkeit'

Answer 3

You could try unidecode to convert Unicode into ascii instead of writing manual regular expressions. It is a Python port of Text::Unidecode Perl module:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import fileinput
import locale
from contextlib import closing
from unidecode import unidecode # $ pip install unidecode

def toascii(files=None, encoding=None, bufsize=-1):
    if encoding is None:
        encoding = locale.getpreferredencoding(False)
    with closing(fileinput.FileInput(files=files, bufsize=bufsize)) as file:
        for line in file: 
            print unidecode(line.decode(encoding)),

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import sys
    toascii(encoding=sys.argv.pop(1) if len(sys.argv) > 1 else None)

It uses FileInput class to avoid global state.

Example:

$ echo 'äöüß' | python toascii.py utf-8
aouss

Answer 4

I use translitcodec

>>> import translitcodec
>>> print '\xe4'.decode('latin-1')
ä
>>> print '\xe4'.decode('latin-1').encode('translit/long').encode('ascii')
ae
>>> print '\xe4'.decode('latin-1').encode('translit/short').encode('ascii')
a

You can change the decode language to whatever you need. You may want a simple function to reduce length of a single implementation.

def fancy2ascii(s):
    return s.decode('latin-1').encode('translit/long').encode('ascii')

Answer 5

Quick and dirty (python2):

def make_ascii(string):
    return string.decode('utf-8').replace(u'ü','ue').replace(u'ö','oe').replace(u'ä','ae').replace(u'ß','ss').encode('ascii','ignore');