Gabor, that's the way to go. I found this article in the online Python Cookbook http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/251871
The last suggestion in de comments seems the most ellegant: unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', input).encode('ASCII', 'ignore') I didn't test this but is seems very usable. Will this or something like this be integrated into Django? Rudolph