Unidecode
ASCII transliterations of Unicode text
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 "\15BA\15A0\1610...", 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>.
REQUIREMENTS
Nothing except Python itself.
You will need a Python build with "wide" Unicode characters in order
for unidecode to work correctly with characters outside of Basic
Multilingual Plane. Surrogate pair encoding of "narrow" builds is not
supported.
INSTALLATION
You install Unidecode, as you would install any Python module,
by running these commands:
python setup.py install
python setup.py test
SUPPORT
Questions, bug reports, useful code bits, and suggestions for
Unidecode should be sent to tomaz@zemanta.com
AVAILABILITY
The latest version of Unidecode is available from the GIT
repository at
http://code.zemanta.com/tsolc/git/unidecode
You can get it by running:
git clone http://code.zemanta.com/tsolc/git/unidecode
COPYRIGHT
Original character transliteration tables:
Copyright 2001, Sean M. Burke <sburke@cpan.org>, all rights reserved.
Python code and later additions:
Copyright 2011, Tomaz Solc <tomaz@zemanta.com>
The programs and documentation in this dist are distributed in the
hope that they will be useful, but without any warranty; without even
the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular
purpose.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl.