Source: unidecode Maintainer: Ubuntu MOTU Developers XSBC-Original-Maintainer: Douglas William Thrift (douglaswth) Section: python Priority: optional Build-Depends: python-all (>= 2.6.6-2ubuntu1), debhelper (>= 7) Standards-Version: 3.9.1 Homepage: http://code.zemanta.com/tsolc/unidecode/ Package: python-unidecode Architecture: all Depends: ${misc:Depends}, ${python:Depends} Breaks: ${python:Breaks} Description: US-ASCII transliterations of Unicode text . 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. . For example 'unidecode(u"\u5317\u4EB0")' returns 'Bei Jing'. . This is a Python port of Text::Unidecode Perl module by Sean M. Burke .