title: What is the best way to remove accents (normalize) in a Python unicode string?
body: <p>I have a Unicode string in Python, and I would like to remove all the accents (diacritics).</p>
  <p>I found on the web an elegant way to do this (in Java):</p>
  <ol>
  <li>convert the Unicode string to its <em><strong>long normalized form</strong></em> (with a separate character for letters and diacritics)</li>
  <li>remove all the characters whose Unicode type is &quot;diacritic&quot;.</li>
  </ol>
  <p>Do I need to install a library such as pyICU or is this possible with just the Python standard library?  And what about python 3?</p>
  <p>Important note: I would like to avoid code with an explicit mapping from accented characters to their non-accented counterpart.</p>