title: Approximately converting unicode string to ascii string in python
body: <p>don't know wether this is trivial or not, but I'd need to convert an unicode string to ascii string, and I wouldn't like to have all those escape chars around. I mean, is it possible to have an "approximate" conversion to some quite similar ascii character?</p>
  
  <p>For example: Gavin O’Connor gets converted to Gavin O\x92Connor, but I'd really like it to be just converted to Gavin O'Connor. Is this possible? Did anyone write some util to do it, or do I have to manually replace all chars?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you very much!
  Marco</p>