How to remove accents and turn letters into "plain" ASCII characters? [duplicate]

I found a solution, that worked in all my test-cases (copied from http://php.net/manual/en/transliterator.transliterate.php):

var_dump(transliterator_transliterate('Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII; [\u0080-\u7fff] remove',
    "A æ Übérmensch på høyeste nivå! И я люблю PHP! есть. ﬁ ¦"));
// string(50) "A ae Ubermensch pa hoyeste niva! I a lublu PHP! est. fi "

see: http://www.php.net/normalizer

EDIT: This solution is independent of the locale set using setlocale(). Another benefit over iconv() is, that even non-latin characters are not ignored.

EDIT2: I discovered, that there are some characters, that are not covered by the transliteration I posted originally. Any-Latin translates the cyrillic character ь to a character, that doesn't fit into a latin character-set: ʹ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_%28symbol%29). I've added [\u0100-\u7fff] remove to remove all these non-latin characters. I also added a test to the text ;)

I suggest, that they mean the latin alphabet and not one of the latin character-sets by Latin here. But anyways - in my opinion, they should transliterate it to something ASCII then in Latin-ASCII ...

EDIT3: Sorry for another change here. I had to take the characters down to u0080 instead of u0100, to get only ASCII characters as output. The test above is updated.

If you have iconv installed, try this (the example assumes your input string is in UTF-8):

echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);

(iconv is a library to convert between all kinds of encodings; it's efficient and included with many PHP distributions by default. Most of all, it's definitely easier and more error-proof than trying to roll your own solution (did you know that there's a "Latin letter N with a curl"? Me neither.))

Reposting this on request of @palantir ...

I find iconv completely unreliable, and I dislike preg_replace solutions and big arrays ... so my favorite way (and the only reliable method I've found) is ...

function toASCII( $str )
{
    return strtr(utf8_decode($str), 
        utf8_decode(
        'ŠŒŽšœžŸ¥µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ'),
        'SOZsozYYuAAAAAAACEEEEIIIIDNOOOOOOUUUUYsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiionoooooouuuuyy');
}

You can use iconv to transliterate the characters to plain US-ASCII and then use a regular expression to remove non-alphabetic characters:

preg_replace('/[^a-z]/i', '', iconv("UTF-8", "US-ASCII//TRANSLIT", $text))

Another way would be using the Normalizer to normalize to the Normalization Form KD (NFKD) and then remove the mark characters:

preg_replace('/\p{Mn}/u', '', Normalizer::normalize($text, Normalizer::FORM_KD))

Note: I'm reposting this from another similar question in the hope that it's helpful to others.

I ended up writing a PHP library based on URLify.js from the Django project, since I found iconv() to be too incomplete. You can find it here:

https://github.com/jbroadway/urlify

Handles Latin characters as well as Greek, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, and Latvian.

How to remove accents and turn letters into "plain" ASCII characters? [duplicate]

Related

Recent Posts