title: Python: Replace typographical quotes, dashes, etc. with their ascii counterparts
body: <p>On my website people can post news and quite a few editors use MS word and similar tools to write the text and then copy&amp;paste into my site's editor (simple textarea, no WYSIWYG etc.).</p>
  
  <p>Those texts usually contain "nice" quotes instead of the plain ascii ones (<code>"</code>). They also sometimes contain those longer dashes like <code>–</code> instead of <code>-</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Now I want to replace all those characters with their ascii counterparts. However, I do not want to remove umlauts and other non-ascii character. I'd also highly prefer to use a proper solution that does not involve creating a mapping dict for all those characters.</p>
  
  <p>All my strings are unicode objects.</p>