translitcodec 0.3

This package contains codecs for transliterating ISO 10646 texts into best-effort representations using smaller coded character sets (ASCII, ISO 8859, etc.). The translation tables used by the codecs are from the transtab collection by Markus Kuhn.

Three types of transliterating codecs are provided:

“long”, using as many characters as needed to make a natural

replacement. For example, u00e4 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS ä will be replaced with ae.

“short”, using the minimum number of characters to make a replacement. For example, u00e4 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS ä will be replaced with a.

“one”, only performing single character replacements. Characters that can not be transliterated with a single character are passed through unchanged. For example, u2639 WHITE FROWNING FACE ☹ will be passed through unchanged.

Using the codecs is simple:

>>> import translitcodec
>>> u'fácil € ☺'.encode('translit/long')
u'facil EUR :-)'
>>> u'fácil € ☺'.encode('translit/short')
u'facil E :-)'

The codecs return Unicode by default. To receive a bytestring back, either chain the output of encode() to another codec, or append the name of the desired byte encoding to the codec name:

>>> u'fácil € ☺'.encode('translit/one').encode('ascii', 'replace')
'facil E ?'
>>> u'fácil € ☺'.encode('translit/one/ascii', 'replace')
'facil E ?'

The package also supplies a ‘transliterate’ codec, an alias for ‘translit/long’.