Search ignoring accents in Python

In this article we will learn a simple way to run a search ignoring accents in Python, a problem that happens in our language.

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In Python we have a very interesting and easy way to search in a string ignoring the accent

We need to use the unidecode library, and convert the words to another encode

And in doing so we run our search with ignored accent, let’s see it in practice:

import unidecode

word = "programação"

wordWithoutAccent = unidecode.unidecode(word)

print(wordWithoutAccent)

if(wordWithoutAccent.find('cao')):
 print("Found!")

Here we have the word programming that has an accent, and we use the unidecode method of the unidecode lib to reformat this string without this accent

Then we use find to check if we find ‘cao’ in the word programming without an accent

And so we perform the search ignoring the accent, see the output:

programacao
Found!

We can do this in lists too, check it out:

words = [
 u"programação",
 u"acentuação",
 u"relação",
 u"será",
]

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

Here we create a function that will remove the accent, it basically iterates through each item in the list and uses the same method seen before

The output is:

['programacao', 'acentuacao', 'relacao', 'sera']

This way we can now search this list without any problems, as the accent was removed, thanks to the function we created

Conclusion

In this article we earned how to run a search ignoring accents in Python

We use the unidecode library to remove the accent from the word or words in a list that we need to fetch

Then, just use the find method with the string we want to check in each phrase or word

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