code: def strip_accents(s, encoding= 'utf-8'):
      
      if sys.version < '3':
          if isinstance(s,unicode):
             return unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', s).encode('ASCII', 'ignore')
          else:
             return unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', unicode(s,encoding)).encode('ASCII', 'ignore')
      else:
          if isinstance(s,bytes): s = str(s,encoding)
          return str(unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', s).encode('ASCII', 'ignore'),'ascii')
docs: Strip characters with diacritics and return a flat ascii representation