Strip the accents from a unicode (e.g. Vietnamese) text

strip_accents.py

def strip_accents(text):
    """
    Strips the accents, replace the dd, and lower case
    """
    text = text.replace("đ", "d").replace("Đ", "d")
    text = unicodedata.normalize("NFD", text)
    text = text.encode("ascii", "ignore")
    text = text.decode("utf-8")
    text = text.lower()
    return text