It often happens that you have text data in Unicode, but you need to represent it in ASCII.
In most of these examples you could represent Unicode characters as "???" or "\15BA\15A0\1610", to mention two extreme cases. But that's nearly useless to someone who actually wants to read what the text says.
What Unidecode provides is a middle road: function unidecode() takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in ASCII characters (i.e., the universally displayable characters between 0x00 and 0x7F), where the compromises taken when mapping between two character sets are chosen to be near what a human with a US keyboard would choose.
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