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A couple of days ago, I worked with an ugly unicode text, kind of like this:

ⒶⓀⓋⓉⒺ
b̼̘̬ͭ͂̈́̀l͇͉̱͚̲̗̗͞a̱̭̬͎͉̤ͨ͂̌̑̓͂͐h̬̯̻̩͗ͩͯḅ̢̬͕͈̥̅̌͆̔̉ͅḽ̘̖̼͚́͒̈́̏͌̃͟ ͎̮̫̍ͫ̽͐͋ͤ͂a̜͔̩͇̩̪͐̍̐̃ͤ͑ ̦̌ḧ̙̝͓̜͕̝̈́ͅb̛̞͔̽̃̍ͪla̘̠͖͍̣͙̝͌ͪ͒̃ͯ ͗͛̆͊.̛̭̜̞̲͓̯ͧ̅ĥ͂͑/̢̊/̠̘͖͖̖̺̯

And I need to get a normal text from this shit, because MySQL has weird unicode support. So I made these simple functions for cleaning up unicode text:

def strip_accents(s):
    """ Strip accents from a string """
    result = []
    for char in s:
		# Pass these symbols without processing
        if char in [u'й', u'Й', u'\n']: 
            result.append(char)
            continue
        for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', char):
            if unicodedata.category(c) == 'Mn':
                continue
            result.append(c)
    return ''.join(result)

def strip_symbols(s):
    """ Strip ugly unicode symbols from a string """
    result = []
    for char in s:
		# Pass these symbols without processing
        if char in [u'й', u'Й', u'\n']:
            result.append(char)
            continue
        for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', char):
            if unicodedata.category(c) == 'Zs':
                result.append(u' ')
                continue
            if unicodedata.category(c) not in ['So', 'Mn', 
                             'Lo', 'Cn', 'Co', 'Cf', 'Cc']:
                result.append(c)
    return u"".join(result)

Sometimes you need to use unix timestamp in Python for data exchange with external application (e.g. PunBB stores date as timestamp). Unfortunately Python doesn’t have a built-in function for that. 
Here are some functions for that from my utils.py.

Convert datetime.datetime object to unix timestamp:

def timestamp(datetime_obj):
    """ Convert datetime object to timestamp """
    if type(datetime_obj) is datetime.datetime:
        return int(time.mktime(datetime_obj.timetuple()))
    else:
        return int(datetime_obj)

Convert unix timestamp to datetime.datetime object:

def from_timestamp(timestamp):
    """ Convert timestamp to datetime object"""
    return datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp)

Return current unix timestamp:

def timestamp_now():
    """ Return current unix timestamp """
    return timestamp(datetime.datetime.now())

Enjoy!