---
id: anyascii
version: "0.3.3"
license: unclear
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# anyascii — Unicode to ASCII transliteration

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 4.1M/mo

## What it is and what it does

AnyAscii is a Unicode-to-ASCII transliteration library that replaces Unicode characters with their closest ASCII equivalents on a character-by-character basis. It uses established romanization systems for different scripts and converts symbolic characters based on their meaning or appearance. All ASCII characters pass through unchanged; unmapped or unknown characters are removed entirely.

The library is lightweight with no external dependencies and supports Python 3.3 and later. It's commonly used for generating URL slugs, normalizing text for search, handling emoji conversion, and preparing multilingual input for ASCII-only systems. The transliteration is deterministic and context-free, making it predictable but not linguistically sophisticated.

Use it for:

- Generate URL-safe slugs from Unicode titles or user input without special characters.
- Normalize multilingual text for systems that only accept ASCII (legacy databases, APIs).
- Convert emoji and symbolic characters to readable ASCII equivalents in text processing pipelines.
- Prepare search queries by removing diacritics and non-ASCII characters for matching.
- Clean user-generated content to prevent encoding issues in downstream systems.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Converts Unicode text to ASCII-only equivalents by transliterating each character to its best ASCII representation, leaving ASCII input unchanged and removing unmapped characters.

Yes. The package is actively maintained, has no dependencies, installs with low friction, carries no known vulnerabilities, and uses a permissive license. It solves a specific, common problem (Unicode-to-ASCII conversion) reliably. Install if you need straightforward character transliteration; skip if you need context-aware linguistic transformation or language-specific romanization rules.

## Install

pip install anyascii
uv add anyascii
poetry add anyascii

## Installing anyascii

Before you install: Low install friction with no runtime dependencies. Active maintenance: last commit 2026-06-06, latest release 2025-06-29, 411 days since last release. Repository has 420 stars and is not archived.

License in practice: Licensed under ISC (permissive), which allows commercial and private use with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart:

pip install anyascii

from anyascii import anyascii

result = anyascii('άνθρωποι')
assert result == 'anthropoi'

Requires Python 3.3 or later.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the character-by-character transliteration approach handles combining marks and multi-character sequences as expected for your use case.
- Performance characteristics when processing large volumes of text or very long strings.

## Package facts

- License: not declared (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 4.1M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

unicode to ascii conversion, text transliteration, ascii slug generation, unicode normalization, romanization library, emoji to ascii, remove unicode characters, text-processing, unicode-handling, slug-generation

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