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.