Use the Unidecode library for this: https://pypi.org/project/Unidecode/, that guarantees a ascii string in return.

Answer from DrummerMann on Stack Overflow
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AskPython
askpython.com › python › string › converting-unicode-strings-to-regular-strings
Converting Unicode Strings to Regular Strings in Python - AskPython
March 30, 2023 - The unicode converted String : ... can transform Unicode strings into normal strings using the unicode.normalize() function from the unicodedata module....
Discussions

python - Replace special characters with ASCII equivalent - Stack Overflow
Is there any lib that can replace special characters to ASCII equivalents, like: "Cześć" to: "Czesc" I can of course create map: {'ś':'s', 'ć': 'c'} and use some replace function. But I don't wa... More on stackoverflow.com
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Special Characters in str.replace()
You need to escape characters that hold special meaning (eg. [] denotes a character group in regex). To escape them (ie. making them behave like normal characters) you put a backslash in front of them: [ -> \[ ] -> \] " -> \" \ -> \\ More on reddit.com
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July 24, 2022
How can I convert encoding of special characters in python? - Stack Overflow
I have have a file includes some sentences. But some of them contains some wired characters (å, ä, Ä), shown below. What are they and is there a way convert them back to normal characters in python? More on stackoverflow.com
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How to convert special characters to normal text when exporting to file in Python? - Stack Overflow
I have some input data from a website, that I have gathered using BeautifulSoup. After I have collected the relevant information from the site, I want to export it to JSON. This is what some of my More on stackoverflow.com
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Coderanch
coderanch.com › t › 709349 › languages › Replace-special-characters
Replace special characters [Solved] (Jython/Python forum at Coderanch)
programming forums Java Mobile Certification Databases Caching Books Engineering Micro Controllers OS Languages Paradigms IDEs Build Tools Frameworks Application Servers Open Source This Site Careers Other Pie Elite all forums · this forum made possible by our volunteer staff, including ... ... Hello everyone, I start in Jython and I would like open a file and replace special characters Here my code : s = open("C:\JYTHON\TEST.xml").read() s = s.replace('&', '') s = s.replace('è', '') s = s.replace('é', '') s = s.replace('*', '') s = s.replace('%', '') s = s.replace('@', '') s = s.replace('ç', '') s = s.replace('à', '') s = s.replace('#', '') s = s.replace('«', '') s = s.replace('»', '') f = open("C:\JYTHON\TEST.xml", 'w') f.write(s) f.close() It works for : & * % &nbsp;# It does not work for : é è ç à << >> In addition, my list may not be exhaustive: ê Ê ...
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Python documentation
docs.python.org › 3 › howto › unicode.html
Unicode HOWTO — Python 3.14.7 documentation
This algorithm has special handling ... street.casefold() 'gürzenichstrasse' A second tool is the unicodedata module’s normalize() function that converts strings to one of several normal forms, where letters followed by a combining ...
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Delft Stack
delftstack.com › home › howto › python › python unicode to string
How to Convert Unicode Characters to ASCII String in Python | Delft Stack
February 2, 2024 - The Python module unicodedata provides ... filtering, and lookup of these characters significantly easier. unicodedata has a function called normalize() that accepts two parameters, the normalized form of the Unicode string and ...
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Medium
randombites.medium.com › how-to-handle-accented-special-strings-175e65d96123
How to handle accented & special character strings in Python. | by MP | Medium
September 14, 2018 - Strings with accented or special characters are unicode strings while regular one’s ascii. So to handle unicode strings as regular ascii strings one has to convert unicode strings to ascii.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/learnpython › special characters in str.replace()
r/learnpython on Reddit: Special Characters in str.replace()
July 24, 2022 -

I have the following code.

The aim is to remove all special characters from the column of a DataFrame, although it does not matter if all special characters are removed from the DataFrame.

The code i have used is:

words = combined_body_title.title_body.str.split().explode().str.replace("[?.',)(/:!]","", regex=True)

This works until i put in quotation markets or brackets.

I have read the documentation, from that i think i am using it wrong. I should not be trying to change more than one character within the str.replace, but for some reason it still works just not for brackets and quotation marks.

If you could suggest an alternative solution or help me fix this one i would really appreciate it!

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w3tutorials
w3tutorials.net › blog › removing-accent-and-special-characters
Python: How to Remove Accents, Special Characters, and Convert Strings to Lowercase (with Code Examples) — w3tutorials.net
Python’s built-in unicodedata module provides tools to work with Unicode characters. To remove accents, we use Unicode normalization to decompose characters into their base and diacritic components, then filter out the diacritics.
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Madhur
madhur.co.in › blog › 2016 › 04 › 25 › handling-special-characters-python.html
Handling special characters in Python 2 – Madhur Ahuja
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file pychar.py on line 3, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details · As the error suggests, the first step is to declare encoding on top of file:
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GeeksforGeeks
geeksforgeeks.org › python-convert-html-characters-to-strings
Python - Convert HTML Characters To Strings - GeeksforGeeks
January 15, 2025 - html module provides the unescape() function, which is useful for converting HTML entities back into normal text. This method works well for converting HTML-encoded strings into their original form.
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Stack Overflow
stackoverflow.com › questions › 58962800 › replace-special-unicode-characters-with-normal-letters
python - Replace special unicode characters with normal letters - Stack Overflow
If I run your 'unicode_escape' attempt (after replacing the single quotes for double quotes), I get it to work by removing the newline characters, which is what it's reporting it's failing on.
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GitHub
gist.github.com › j4mie › 557354
Normalise (normalize) unicode data in Python to remove umlauts, accents etc. · GitHub
line = "EL NIÑO" line = line.replace('Ñ','-&-') line= str(unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', line).encode('ascii','ignore'))[2:-1] line = line.replace('-&-','Ñ') Replace -&- with some other random character combination that doesn't appear in your text This is also case sensitive and character specific.
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Real Python
realpython.com › python-encodings-guide
Unicode & Character Encodings in Python: A Painless Guide – Real Python
May 20, 2019 - This also means that the "\Uxxxxxxxx" form is the only escape sequence that is capable of holding any Unicode character. Note: Here’s a short function to convert strings that look like "U+10346" into something Python can work with.