Replace diacritic characters with “equivalent” ASCII in PHP?

Question

Related questions:

1. How to replace characters in a java String?
2. How to replace special characters with their equivalent (such as " á " for " a") in C#?

As in the questions above, I'm looking for a reliable, robust way to reduce any unicode character to near-equivalent ASCII using PHP. I really want to avoid rolling my own look up table.

For example (stolen from 1st referenced question): Gračišće becomes Gracisce

Answer 1

The iconv module can do this, more specifically, the iconv() function:

$str = iconv('Windows-1252', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', "Gracišce");
echo $str;
//outputs "Gracisce"

The main hassle with iconv is that you just have to watch your encodings, but it's definitely the right tool for the job (I used 'Windows-1252' for the example due to limitations of the text editor I was working with ;) The feature of iconv that you definitely want to use is the //TRANSLIT flag, which tells iconv to transliterate any characters that don't have an ASCII match into the closest approximation.

Answer 2

I found another solution, based on @zombat's answer.

The issue with his answer was that I was getting:

Notice: iconv() [function.iconv]: Wrong charset, conversion from `UTF-8' to `ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE' is not allowed in D:\www\phpcommand.php(11) : eval()'d code on line 3

And after removing //IGNORE from the function, I got:

Gr'a'e~a~o^O"ucisce

So, the š character was translated correctly, but the other characters weren't.

The solution that worked for me is a mix between preg_replace (to remove everything but [a-zA-Z0-9] - including spaces) and @zombat's solution:

preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9.]/','',iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "GráéãõÔücišce"));

Output:

GraeaoOucisce

Answer 3

My solution is to create two strings - first with not wanted letters and second with letters that will replace firsts.

$from = 'čšć';
$to   = 'csc';
$text = 'Gračišće';

$result = str_replace(str_split($from), str_split($to), $text);

Answer 4

Try this:

function normal_chars($string)
{
    $string = htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    $string = preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', $string);
    $string = preg_replace(array('~[^0-9a-z]~i', '~-+~'), ' ', $string);
    return trim($string);
}

Examples:

echo normal_chars('Álix----_Ãxel!?!?'); // Alix Axel
echo normal_chars('áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ'); // aeiouAEIOU
echo normal_chars('üÿÄËÏÖÜŸåÅ'); // uyAEIOUYaA

Based on the selected answer in this thread: URL Friendly Username in PHP?