Pip installing Unidecode Python 2.7 — A Non-Developer Guide

Installing pip unidecode takes less than a minute and it helps you begin handling weird crap in your python code. You may want to learn how/why python uses unicode from an expert too.
Seriously, here’s the code. Paste “pip install Unidecode” in your Terminal and hit enter.
pip install UnidecodeIn this non-developer guide, I’m going to copy and paste technical explanations about Unidecode, likely do it a huge injustice, and give you the basics on pip install unidecode, links to learn more, etc.
After pip install, you… (but this didnt work for me lol)
$ python setup.py install
$ python setup.py testI ended up doing a find replace because it’s a bit of a burden in early editions of python, for now, will table it.. continue if you need it in your project.
Answer from stackover:
You can use the Unidecode package to automatically convert all Unicode characters to their nearest pure ASCII equivalent.
from unidecode import unidecode
line = unidecode(line)This will handle both directions of double quotes as well as single quotes, em dashes, and other things that you probably haven’t discovered yet.
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And oh hey…
Oh hey, you might not need this blog, feel free to scroll to the bottom for more complicated things you can find by googling for a few hours. And feel free to follow me using a social link below, always interested to learn where people live, how the hell did you find my content, what did you google, I keep up with this because I learned a bunch of simple, easy, free methods to rank my stuff on google. Thanks for your time.
Requirements
Nothing except Python itself.
and… You need a Python build with “wide” Unicode characters (also called “UCS-4 build”) in order for unidecode to work correctly with characters outside of Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Common characters outside BMP are bold, italic, script, etc. variants of the Latin alphabet intended for mathematical notation. Surrogate pair encoding of “narrow” builds is not supported in unidecode.
If your Python build supports “wide” Unicode the following expression will return True:
Open your python terminal, and run these two lines. If it’s false, check out pep 261.
>>> import sys
>>> sys.maxunicode > 0xffff
TrueSee PEP 261 for details regarding support for “wide” Unicode characters in Python.
Why you need to install unidecode…
Something unicode related is on your mind.
Key thing to know…
…this module generally produces better results than simply stripping accents from characters (which can be done in Python with built-in functions). It is based on hand-tuned character mappings that for example also contain ASCII approximations for symbols and non-Latin alphabets…
Smart people wrote this… So… I wrote this.
Depending on why you’re needing to install unidecode, it will vary on the depth of knowledge you need to grasp, understand, or stress about implementing in your python code…
Because python 2.7 is a dated version and you might be more successful with a later version of python — as it has more flexibility. (i actually don’t recommend later versions of python to new people because there’s less relevant data in google searches, not like 2.7 python google searches are an improvement, but hey, save my rants for other worse blog posts.
Here’s python’s website, to learn more about UNIDECODE pip install…
Or scroll right past this next complicated link and read how I explain this technical pit of smart people, clearly, in fewer words.
Click above link to navigate to a bunch of super smart stuff that you won’t understand if you’re new to programming.
If you’re half decent already with python, and for whatever reason you’re reading this unidecode pip install blog post by me, a utter idiot at coding but decent at blogging about shit…, I recommend checking out what smarter people write about, like these dudes.
How python explains unicode text, using their unidecode library…
To learn quickly, you will find the text sorted two different ways, to help you quickly learn, especially if you’re a non-developer learning python.
Nearly every sentence in programming documentation, has flown over my head, for at least two decades, I prefer hacking away at code and learning it by reading it, rather than depending on some god complex developer, who doesn’t have anything better to do, than write a bunch of shit I can’t understand… Anyways, should be the intro to my book.
Read BOLD as “technical writers — writing about python.”

Read quoted text as “non-developer explanation.”

Let’s begin.
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It often happens that you have text data in Unicode, but you need to represent it in ASCII.
Wtf is ASCII? Wiki
ASCII (/ˈæskiː/ ( listen) ASS-kee), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices.
ASCII is a type of computer code and it’s likely you don’t need to learn much about it today.
For example when integrating with legacy code that doesn’t support Unicode, or for ease of entry of non-Roman names on a US keyboard, or when constructing ASCII machine identifiers from human-readable Unicode strings that should still be somewhat intelligible (a popular example of this is when making an URL slug from an article title).
If you’re integrating legacy code, follow someone smarter.
In most of these examples you could represent Unicode characters as ??? or \15BA\15A0\1610, to mention two extreme cases. But that’s nearly useless to someone who actually wants to read what the text says.
One bit of this I can agree with… If someone can’t read your text, it’s useless.
In most cases, who knows what your reasoning for finding this need to install Unidecode in your python environment.
One can not predict your needs, but one can tell you where to start fishing!
Have you heard about — fileformate? https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/index.htm
You might be able to find what you need here…
What Unidecode provides is a middle road: function unidecode() takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in ASCII characters (i.e., the universally displayable characters between 0x00 and 0x7F), where the compromises taken when mapping between two character sets are chosen to be near what a human with a US keyboard would choose.
Unidecode pip install may provide a solution to your Unicode problems.
Learn more about Unicode @ the wiki.

(venv) c:\>pip install Unidecode
Collecting Unidecode
Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/59/ef/67085e30e8bbcdd76e2f0a4ad8151c13a2c5bce77c85f8cad6e1f16fb141/Unidecode-1.0.22-py2.py3-none-any.whl (235kB)
100% |################################| 235kB 544kB/s
Installing collected packages: Unidecode
Successfully installed Unidecode-1.0.22
You are using pip version 10.0.1, however version 18.0 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the ‘python -m pip install — upgrade pip’ command.
Other resources:
- Bunch of smart people being super short with their responses and never explaining enough for anyone to learn quickly. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28977618/how-to-convert-utf-8-fancy-quotes-to-neutral-quotes
- Learn about file format data. https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/index.htm
- More about dealing with quotes or double quotes… I’m still ldealing with this process myself! https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
- Some smart people barely explaining the code but offering a resource to get started… https://opensource.com/article/17/3/python-scribus-smart-quotes
- Smart person above explaining smart stuff. https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Convert_Typewriter_Quotes_to_Typographic_Quotes
- Super smart people writing about super smart stuff. https://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html
- Whoever knows SEO is in the top 10 Google.
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