Install Unidecode Python Module on Linux

What is Unidecode?

Unidecode is a Python module that helps convert unidecode text into plain ASCII characters. This is mostly used when the text contains special characters or non-English characters, and you need to simplify it. For example, it converts "ko?u??ek" to "kozuscek", "??" to "Bei Jing", and "naïve" to "naive".

This module is popularly used to simplify for processing or display of user-generated content and international data [multi-lingual].

Installing Python Unidecode Module

To install unidecode or any other Python module, you need pip installed(Python package manager). If you have Python 2 >=2.7.9 or Python 3 >=3.4 installed from python.org, you will already have pip and setuptools, but you will need to upgrade to the latest version. Before installing anything, it is better to check whether Unidecode is already available -

pip show Unidecode

If not installed, you can follow the below steps ?

pip3 install Unidecode

In case you get a 'pip: command not found' error, install it using the following command -

sudo apt install python3-pip

Using a virtual environment is recommended as it helps you avoid conflicts and keeps your project's packages isolated from system-wide installations. Use the below code for installing Unidecode inside the environment -

# Create a new environment
python3 -m venv myenv

# Activate the environment
source myenv/bin/activate

# Install Unidecode inside the environment
pip install Unidecode

Once the unidecode Python module is installed, it can be tested. Below is a simple code to test the module -

from unidecode import unidecode  

# A string with special characters  
special_string = "Café résumé"  

# Converting it to ASCII  
ascii_string = unidecode(special_string)  
print(ascii_string) 

For the code to execute, unidecode has to be installed. The output returned by the above piece of code could be -

Cafe resume

If you ever need to uninstall Unidecode, you can use the command below in your Linus terminal (command line interface) -

pip3 uninstall Unidecode