title: Special text to latin characters in python
body: <p>I have the following pandas data frame:</p>
  <pre><code>the_df = pd.DataFrame({'id':[1,2],'name':['Joe','']})
  the_df
      id  name
  0   1   Joe
  1   2   
  </code></pre>
  <p>As you can see, we can read the second name as &quot;Sarah&quot;, but it's written with special characters.</p>
  <p>I want to create a new column with these characters converted to latin characters. I have tried this approach:</p>
  <pre><code>the_df['latin_name'] = the_df['name'].str.extract(r'(^[a-zA-Z\s]*)')
  the_df
      id  name    latin_name
  0   1   Joe     Joe
  1   2     
  </code></pre>
  <p>But it doesn't recognize the letters. Please, any help on this will be greatly appreciated.</p>