Re: Is there a way to "asciify" a string?

[John Mastro]

Yuri Khan <yurivkhan@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have a person's name (possibly with
> > some national characters), and I want to derive a filename from it.  It
> > doesn't have to be correct in 100% cases.  It doesn't even have to be
> > unambiguous (there will be a number for that in the filename, too).
>
> Technically you could use the name of a person as is, as long as it is
> representable in Unicode and contains neither the null character nor the
> slash character. But I assume you want a filename that is portable between
> file systems, or a filename that can be represented in an URI path segment
> without %-encoding, or any combination of the above.
>
> In that case, the Python unidecode library is probably the closest that you
> can find. But make very sure that the people involved never see their own
> name’s transliteration.

There's also an Emacs Lisp port of unidecode[1]

(unidecode "żółć")
;=> "zolc"

[1]: https://github.com/sindikat/unidecode