code: def normalize_str(string):
      
      if string:
          if not isinstance(string, str):
              string = str(string, 'utf-8', 'replace')
  
          string = string.encode('utf-8')
          return normalize(
              'NFKD', string.decode('utf-8')).encode('ASCII', 'ignore').decode()
      return ''
docs: Remove special characters and strip spaces