Remove special characters and strip spaces

def normalize_str(string):
    """
    Remove special characters and strip spaces
    """
    if string:
        if not isinstance(string, str):
            string = str(string, 'utf-8', 'replace')

        string = string.encode('utf-8')
        return normalize(
            'NFKD', string.decode('utf-8')).encode('ASCII', 'ignore').decode()
    return ''