I'm seeking simple Python function that takes a string and returns a similar one but with all non-ascii characters converted to their closest ascii equivalent. For example, diacritics and whatnot should be dropped. I'm imagining there must be a pretty canonical way to do this and there are plenty of related stackoverflow questions but I'm not finding a simple answer so it seemed worth a separate question.
Example input/output:
"Étienne" -> "Etienne"
Doing a search for 'iconv TRANSLIT python' I found: http://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2009/01/unicode_transliteration_in_python/ which looks like it might be what you need. The comments have some other ideas which use the standard library instead.
There's also http://web.archive.org/web/20070807224749/http://techxplorer.com/2006/07/18/converting-unicode-to-ascii-using-python/ which uses NFKD to get the base characters where possible.
Reading this question made me go looking for something better.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unidecode/0.04.1
Does exactly what you ask for.
Read the answers to some of the duplicate questions. The NFKD gimmick works only as an accent stripper. It doesn't handle ligatures and lots of other Latin-based characters that can't be (or aren't) decomposed. For this a prepared translation table is necessary (and much faster).
In Python 3 and using the regex implementation at PyPI:
Starting with the string:
Normalise to NFKD and then remove the diacritics: