Convert unicode to ASCII

asciify.py

#!/usr/bin/python3

"""
>>> some_unicode = u'èṽèṙẏbody ♥ utf8'
>>>
>>> some_unicode.encode('ascii', errors='replace')
b'?????body ? utf8'
>>>
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', some_unicode).encode(
...     'ascii', errors='replace')
b'e?v?e?r?y?body ? utf8'
>>>
>>> # what you want is errors='ignore' - ... scary
>>> asciified = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', some_unicode).encode(
...    'ascii', errors='ignore')
>>> asciified
b'everybody  utf8'
>>> # now lets just fix whitespace
>>> b' '.join(asciified.split())
b'everybody utf8'
"""