How Can I Efficiently Remove Accents from Unicode Strings in Python Without External Libraries?

Removing Accents from Unicode Strings in Python

Removing accents (diacritics) from Unicode strings is essential for many natural language processing tasks. This article explores efficient techniques for accomplishing this in Python without external libraries.

Normalization and Accent Removal

The proposed approach involves two steps:

1. Normalization: Unicode strings can be normalized into different forms. For accent removal, the "Decomposition, Canonical" form is preferred. This converts accented characters into their base form and separate diacritic marks.
2. Diacritic Removal: After normalization, diacritic marks can be filtered out based on their Unicode character type.

Python Implementation

import unicodedata

def remove_accents(text):
  normalized_text = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', text)
  diacritic_chars = [c for c in normalized_text if unicodedata.category(c) == 'Mn']
  return ''.join([c for c in normalized_text if c not in diacritic_chars])

This function takes a Unicode string as input and returns a string without any accents.

Example

text = "François"
print(remove_accents(text))  # "Francois"

Limitations

This method may fail to remove accents correctly for all languages and Unicode strings. For more complex cases, consider using dedicated libraries or regex-based solutions.

Additional Notes

• Python 3 provides additional Unicode normalization and filtering functions, simplifying the process.
• The unicodedata module offers the unicodedata.category() function to identify character types.
• Unidecode is a popular third-party library for Unicode normalization and accent removal, but it is not necessary for this task.

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