convert accented characters to normal python

# Answer written by Eswara Moorthy and edited by Igor Chubin and
# Saurabh Bhandari on StackOverflow.com
# (https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/44433664/4).
# Licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0
# (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
import unicodedata

def strip_accents(text):

    try:
        text = unicode(text, 'utf-8')
    except NameError: # unicode is a default on python 3 
        pass

    text = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text)\
           .encode('ascii', 'ignore')\
           .decode("utf-8")
    return str(text)


s = strip_accents('àéêöhello')

print s

def simplify(text):
	import unicodedata
	try:
		text = unicode(text, 'utf-8')
	except NameError:
		pass
	text = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text).encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode("utf-8")
	return str(text)