'Strips irrelevant formatting junk from name input.
Specifically: everything is lowercased, and accents are removed.'

def normalize_name(self, name):

    nkfd_form = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', text_type(name))
    name = u''.join((c for c in nkfd_form if (unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn')))
    name = unicodedata.normalize('NFC', name)
    name = name.strip()
    name = name.lower()
    return name
