Unidecode

It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but you can't display it -- usually because you're trying to show it to a user via an application that doesn't support Unicode, or because the fonts you need aren't accessible. You could represent the Unicode characters as " ??" or "... Platforms: Mac

Unidecode puts simplicity and robustness over accuracy. That is stated quite well in the original Perl module's documentation. It is good for producing file names or identifiers in systems that can't support Unicode, where something remotely readable is way better than a numeric ID. Platforms: *nix