README

-*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Unicode to 8-bit charset transliteration codec.

This package contains codecs for transliterating ISO 10646 texts into
best-effort representations using smaller coded character sets (ASCII,
ISO 8859, etc.).  The translation tables used by the codecs are from
the ``transtab`` collection by Markus Kuhn.

Three types of transliterating codecs are provided:

  "long", using as many characters as needed to make a natural
   replacement.  For example, \u00e4 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH
   DIAERESIS ``ä`` will be replaced with ``ae``.

  "short", using the minimum number of characters to make a
  replacement.  For example, \u00e4 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH
  DIAERESIS ``ä`` will be replaced with ``a``.

  "one", only performing single character replacements.  Characters
  that can not be transliterated with a single character are passed
  through unchanged. For example, \u2639 WHITE FROWNING FACE ``☹``
  will be passed through unchanged.

Using the codecs is simple::

  >>> import translitcodec
  >>> u'fácil € ☺'.encode('translit/long')
  u'facil EUR :-)'
  >>> u'fácil € ☺'.encode('translit/short')
  u'facil E :-)'

The codecs return Unicode by default.  To receive a bytestring back,
either chain the output of encode() to another codec, or append the
name of the desired byte encoding to the codec name::

  >>> u'fácil € ☺'.encode('translit/one').encode('ascii', 'replace')
  'facil E ?'
  >>> u'fácil € ☺'.encode('translit/one/ascii', 'replace')
  'facil E ?'

The package also supplies a 'transliterate' codec, an alias for
'translit/long'.