"""Utility functions."""

import string

def ct(s: str) -> str:
    """ct = cleantext

    Takes a utf-8 string and converts to ascii lower case without punctuation
    """
    if not s:
        return ""
    return s.encode('utf-8').decode('ascii', 'ignore').\
            translate(str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation)).lower().strip()
