import unicodedata
def strip_accents(text):
try:
text = unicode(text, 'utf-8')
except NameError: # unicode is a default on python 3
pass
text = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text)
.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
.decode("utf-8")
return str(text)
s = strip_accents('àéêöhello')
print s