How to make Django slugify work properly with Unicode strings?

Question

What can I do to prevent slugify filter from stripping out non-ASCII alphanumeric characters? (I'm using Django 1.0.2)

cnprog.com has Chinese characters in question URLs, so I looked in their code. They are not using slugify in templates, instead they're calling this method in Question model to get permalinks

def get_absolute_url(self):
    return '%s%s' % (reverse('question', args=[self.id]), self.title)

Are they slugifying the URLs or not?

Answer 1

There is a python package called unidecode that I've adopted for the askbot Q&A forum, it works well for the latin-based alphabets and even looks reasonable for greek:

>>> import unidecode
>>> from unidecode import unidecode
>>> unidecode(u'διακριτικός')
'diakritikos'

It does something weird with asian languages:

>>> unidecode(u'影師嗎')
'Ying Shi Ma '
>>> 

Does this make sense?

In askbot we compute slugs like so:

from unidecode import unidecode
from django.template import defaultfilters
slug = defaultfilters.slugify(unidecode(input_text))