Many written languages using latin alphabets employ diacritical marks. Even today, it is still pretty common to encounter situations where it would be desirable to get rid of them: files naming, creation of easy to read URIs, indexing schemes, etc.

An easy way has always been to simply filter out any "decorated characters"; unfortunately, this does not preserve the base, undecorated glyphs. But thanks to Unicode support in Python, it is now straightforward to perform such a transliteration.

(This recipe was completely rewritten based on a comment by Mathieu Clabaut: many thanks to him!)