Replace accented chars with unaccented ones

[Jeff Epler]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 06:19:00PM -0800, Josiah Carlson wrote:
> Translating the replacements pairs into a dictionary would result in a 
> significant speedup for large numbers of replacements.
> 
> mapping = dict(replacement_pairs)
> 
> def multi_replace(inp, mapping=mapping):
>     return u''.join([mapping.get(i, i) for i in inp])
> 
> One pass through the file gives an O(len(inp)) algorithm, much better 
> (running-time wise) than the string.replace method that runs in 
> O(len(inp) * len(replacement_pairs)) time as given.

Thanks for posting this.  My other code was pretty hopeless, but for
some reason .get(i, i) didn't come to mind as a solution.

Jeff