docs: def mangle_unicode_to_ascii(s: Any) -> str:
      """
      Mangle unicode to ASCII, losing accents etc. in the process.
      """
      # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1207457
      if s is None:
          return ""
      if not isinstance(s, str):
          s = str(s)
      return (
          unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', s)
                     .encode('ascii', 'ignore')  # gets rid of accents
                     .decode('ascii')  # back to a string
      )