[Python] Python: Replace typographical quotes, dashes, etc. with their ascii counterparts

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&paste into my site's editor (simple textarea, no WYSIWYG etc.).

Those texts usually contain "nice" quotes instead of the plain ascii ones ("). They also sometimes contain those longer dashes like – instead of -.

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.

All my strings are unicode objects.

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