Converts all keys and values of a dictionary to ASCII strings

stringify_dictionary.py

import unicodedata

def stringify_dictionary(dic):
    """
    Converts all keys and values of a dictionary to ascii strings
    """
    tmp = {}
    for k, v in dic.iteritems():

        # First transform all characters to unicode
        key = unicode(k)
        value = unicode(v)

        # Now normalize all unicode characters
        key = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', key)
        value = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', value)

        # Encode strings back to ascii
        key = key.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
        value = value.encode('ascii', 'ignore')

        tmp[key] = value

    return tmp