prize18-5  Exercise 3: Stripping Accents
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Idea: NFD splits each accented letter into a base letter plus combining marks; marks have a non-zero combining class, so filtering on that removes them;
NFC then recomposes whatever remains. Letters that have no decomposition (they are separate base letters, not letter-plus-mark) are untouched.

ex3.py:

  import unicodedata as ud

  def strip_accents(s):
      d = ud.normalize("NFD", s)
      return ud.normalize("NFC", "".join(c for c in d if not ud.combining(c)))

  for word in ["Zo\u00eb", "cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e", "\u00c5ngstr\u00f6m", "\u00f8re", "stra\u00dfe", "\u0141\u00f3d\u017a"]:
      print(f"{word} -> {strip_accents(word)}")

Real output (Python 3.14):

  Zoë -> Zoe
  crème brûlée -> creme brulee
  Ångström -> Angstrom
  øre -> øre
  straße -> straße
  Łódź -> Łodz

Unchanged: the slashed o, the sharp s and the barred L. Each is its own base letter with no canonical decomposition into letter plus mark, so removing
marks cannot touch them. Turning them into "o", "ss" or "L" needs a separate, language-specific table (an extra step, and a policy choice).