IsoUnidecode

This is a package for conversion and transliteration of unicode into ascii or iso-8859-1 strings. This is mostly a port of Perl Text::Unidecode to Python with additional support for iso8859-1.

This package provides one function - unidecode() which tries to represent input unicode object as an 'ascii' or 'iso8859-1' string replacing characters unavailable in the target encoding with similar characters or their transliteration.

It works with different agree of success for different lanugages. It works quite good for European languages, works ok for Russian, and works to some extent for Arabic, Hindi.

Unidecode even produces something for Chinese and Japanese - but I am not really sure that such results are any good at all.

There are some additional fixes (not present in Text::Unidecode) in iso8859-1 conversion table article which enable unidecode to convert unicode string in any European language into iso8859-1.

Example usage

Ascii conversion:

>>> from isounidecode import unidecode
>>> unidecode(u"Programmes de publicité - Solutions d'entreprise")
"Programmes de publicite - Solutions d'entreprise"

>>> unidecode(u"Транслитерирует и русский")
'Translitieriruiet i russkii'

iso8859-1 conversion:

>>> from isounidecode import unidecode
>>> unidecode(u"Programmes de publicité - Solutions d'entreprise", 'iso8859-1')
"Programmes de publicit\xe9 - Solutions d'entreprise"

Another Unidecode package

There exists another unidecode python package. Which was registered first on PyPI. I learned about the existence of that package only when I ran "python setup.py register".

I created this package a couple of years ago - at that time there was no other unidecode packages. I made this package and completely forgot about its existencse unitil it suddenly came in handy recently.

So I decided to add readme, and upload it to PYPI. Now I know there's another unidecode package, so I am renaming this package into "isounidecode".