title: Conversion utf to ascii in python with pandas dataframe
body: <p>I am trying to convert datas in DataFrame of unicode words into ASCII into a new column with certain character changes...</p>
  
  <pre><code>characterMap = {u'\u00E7': 'c', u'\u00C7' : 'C', u'\u011F' : 'g', u'\u011E' : 'G', u'\u00F6': 'o', u'\u00D6' : 'O', u'\u015F' : 's', u'\u015E' : 'S', u'\u00FC' : 'u', u'\u00DC' : 'U' , u'\u0131' : 'i', u'\u0049' : 'I', u'\u0259' : 'e', u'\u018F' : 'E'}
  
  def convertASCII(word):
      asciiWord = ""
      word = str(word).rstrip()
      for c in word:
          if c in characterMap.keys():
              asciiWord = asciiWord + characterMap[c]
          else:
              asciiWord = asciiWord + c
      return asciiWord;
  
  test['ascii'] = test['token'].apply(convertASCII)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So say the result should look something like this...</p>
  
  <pre><code>               token         ascii
  1555757    qurbangaha    qurbangaha
  379221          saylı         sayli
  2456599      öhdəliyi      ohdeliyi
  1128903            ki            ki
  467997         ilişib        ilisib
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, the ASCII column is just a repetition of the token column instead of the desired result above? I have ran manually the convertASCII code on another script, it does what I want it to, but not sure what is the bug with pandas?</p>