Finding and replacing strings with accented characters using ArcPy UpdateCursor?

Question

I have a number of feature classes in which some records in the attribute tables need updating with new information. However the strings to replace aren't found in the UpdateCursor due to the presence of accented characters. I've run the same search on the table and just removed the accented e (é) from both the record and the search string and the string is found and replaced correctly.

# For each row, evaluate the PRESENCE field (index position 
# of 0), 
# and update with new value if the record reads
# "Présence n'est pas probable"
with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(fc, inputField) as cursor:
 for row in cursor:
 if row[0] == "Présence n'est pas probable":
 row[0] = "Non probable"
 cursor.updateRow(row)
 else:
 pass

How does one search for a string with accented characters?

• enolan: Saw other post: stackoverflow.com/questions/13325753/…
• enolan: Also this with regex which should work: stackoverflow.com/questions/50847976/…

Answer 1

As commented you can remove the accents using unicodedata.normalize. I have not tried the code but I think it should work:

import unicodedata, arcpy
def remove_accents(input_str):
 #From: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/517923/what-is-the-best-way-to-remove-accents-in-a-python-unicode-string
 nfkd_form = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', input_str)
 only_ascii = nfkd_form.encode('ASCII', 'ignore')
 return only_ascii
with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(fc, inputField) as cursor:
 for row in cursor:
 if remove_accents(row[0]) == remove_accents("Présence n'est pas probable"):
 row[0] = "Non probable"
 cursor.updateRow(row)
 else:
 pass