I am looking to replace from a large document all high unicode characters, such as accented Es, left and right quotes, etc., with "normal" counterparts in the low range, such as a regular 'E', and straight quotes. I need to perform this on a very large document rather often. I see an example of this in what I think might be perl here: http://www.designmeme.com/mtplugins/lowdown.txt

Is there a fast way of doing this in Python without using s.replace(...).replace(...).replace(...)...? I've tried this on just a few characters to replace and the document stripping became really slow.