I have a dataframe dataSwiss which contains the information Swiss municipalities. I want to replace the letter with accents with normal letter.

This is what I am doing:

dataSwiss['Municipality'] = dataSwiss['Municipality'].str.encode('utf-8')
dataSwiss['Municipality'] = dataSwiss['Municipality'].str.replace(u"é", "e")

but I get the following error:

----> 2 dataSwiss['Municipality'] = dataSwiss['Municipality'].str.replace(u"é", "e")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

data looks like:

dataSwiss.Municipality
0               Zürich
1               Zürich
2               Zürich
3               Zürich
4               Zürich
5               Zürich
6               Zürich
7               Zürich

I found the solution

s = dataSwiss['Municipality']
res = s.str.decode('utf-8')
res = res.str.replace(u"é", "e")

This is one way. You can convert to byte literal first before decoding to utf-8.

s = pd.Series(['hello', 'héllo', 'Zürich', 'Zurich'])res = s.str.normalize('NFKD')\.str.encode('ascii', errors='ignore')\.str.decode('utf-8')print(res)0     hello
1     hello
2    Zurich
3    Zurich
dtype: object

pd.Series.str.normalize uses unicodedata module. As per the docs:

The normal form KD (NFKD) will apply the compatibility decomposition,i.e. replace all compatibility characters with their equivalents.