Remove accents from text. E.g.: "ÃÊÍÒÜ-ãêíòü" -> "AEIOU-aeiou"

remove_accents.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys, unicodedata
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")
# sys.setdefaultencoding("cp1252")

def remove_accents(txt):
    # Returns a string without accents
    return unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', unicode(txt)).encode('ASCII', 'ignore')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print remove_accents(u'ÃÊÍÒÜ-ãêíòü')  # Out: AEIOU-aeiou