How to do a search ignoring accentuation in Python?

Based on the comment and reference from @bfavaretto, I was able to set up a proof-of-concept. The solution is to remove the diacritics both from the list to be searched and from the search term. To do this, the string is normalized first to ensure that the matching characters are represented separately, then remove those characters (which in the case of accents, etc, have the Unicode Mn ).

I attempted to do the replacement using the regex module, with no success, so I opted for a separate function. The [binary] search code came from that answer in the English OS.

import unicodedata
from bisect import bisect_left

def remover_combinantes(string):
    string = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', string)
    return u''.join(ch for ch in string if unicodedata.category(ch) != 'Mn')

palavras_norm = [remover_combinantes(x) for x in palavras]

def binary_search(a, x, lo=0, hi=None):   # can't use a to specify default for hi
    hi = hi if hi is not None else len(a) # hi defaults to len(a)   
    pos = bisect_left(a,x,lo,hi)          # find insertion position
    return (pos if pos != hi and a[pos] == x else -1) # don't walk off the end

def buscar(lista, palavra):
    return binary_search(lista, remover_combinantes(palavra))

>>> buscar(palavras_norm, u'programacao')
2
>>> buscar(palavras_norm, u'programação')
2

There is an easier solution, that is, to install a module that does this work directly. This module is unidecode , which exists for both Python 2 and Python 3.

If you are on a Unix-like system, the best installation solution is to directly use the terminal pip for Python 2 or pip3 for Python 3 in the following way: / p>

This is a practical and complete example using the list you gave as an example:

import unidecode

palavras = [
    u"acentuacao",
    u"divagacão",
    u"programaçao",
    u"taxação",
]

def to_ascii(ls):
    for i in range(len(ls)):
        ls[i] = unidecode.unidecode(ls[i])

to_ascii(palavras)
print(palavras)

And the output is as follows:

['acentuacao', 'divagacao', 'programacao', 'taxacao']

For more information about the module, see here or here in Python's official site. If you are interested in modifying or simply viewing the code, here you have the repository in GitHub .

For more information, there are at least this post or this on the other OS that may be useful.

You can write a method to remove accents:

import unicodedata

def remove_accents(input_str):
    nkfd_form = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', input_str)
    only_ascii = nkfd_form.encode('ASCII', 'ignore')
    return only_ascii

lista = [remove_accents(i) for i in ['é', 'á']]
'e' in lista

So I think it's easy for you to take your need!