A monkey patch (or guerrilla patch) is a piece of code that extends or modifies another piece of code at runtime. It is not recommended that you use monkey patches often; however, sometimes, they are the only possible way to fix a bug in complex third-party modules without creating a separate branch of the module. Also, monkey patching can be used to prepare functional or unit tests without using complicated and time-consuming database or file manipulations.

In this recipe, you will learn how to exchange the default slugify() function with the one from the third-party transliterate package, which handles the conversion of Unicode characters to ASCII equivalents more intelligently and includes a number of language packs that provide even more specific transformations as needed. As a quick reminder, we use the slugify() utility to create a URL-friendly version of an object's title or uploaded filename. When processed, the function strips any leading and trailing whitespace, converts the text to lowercase, removes non-alphanumeric characters, and converts spaces to hyphens.