Method to substitute foreign for English characters in Java?

Question

In PHP I would use this:

$text = "Je prends une thé chaud, s'il vous plaît";
$search = array('é','î','è'); // etc.
$replace = array('e','i','e'); // etc.
$text = str_replace($search, $replace, $text); 

But the Java String method "replace" doesn't seem to accept arrays as input. Is there a way to do this (without having to resort to a for loop to go through the array)?

Please say if there's a more elegant way than the method I'm attempting.

Answer 1

A really nice way to do it is using the replaceEach() method from the StringUtils class in Apache Commons Lang 2.4.

String text = "Je prends une thé chaud, s'il vous plaît";
String[] search = new String[] {"é", "î", "è"};
String[] replace = new String[] {"e", "i", "e"};
String newText = StringUtils.replaceEach(text, 
                search, 
                replace);

Results in

Je prends une the chaud, s'il vous plait

Answer 2

There's no method that works identically to the PHP one in the standard API, though there may be something in Apache Commons. You could do it by replacing the characters individually:

s = s.replace('é','e').replace('î', 'i').replace('è', 'e');

A more sophisticated method that does not require you to enumerate the characters to substitute (and is thus more likely not to miss anything) but does require a loop (which will happen anyway internally, whatever method you use) would be to use java.text.Normalizer to separate letters and diacritics and then strip out everything with a character type of Character.MODIFIER_LETTER.

Answer 3

I'm not a Java guy, but I'd recommend a generic solution using the Normalizer class to decompose accented characters and then remove the Unicode "COMBINING" characters.

Answer 4

You're going to have to do a loop:

String text = "Je prends une thé chaud, s'il vous plaît";
Map<Character, String> replace = new HashMap<Character, String>();
replace.put('é', "e");
replace.put('î', "i");
replace.put('è', "e");
StringBuilder s = new StringBuilder();
for (int i=0; i<text.length(); i++) {
  char c = text.charAt(i);
  String rep = replace.get(c);
  if (rep == null) {
    s.append(c);
  } else {
    s.append(rep);
  }
}
text = s.toString();

Note: Some characters are replaced with multiple characters. In German, for example, u-umlaut is converted to "ue".

Edit: Made it much more efficient.

Answer 5

There's no standard method as far as I know, but here's a class that does what you want:

http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t19704.html

Answer 6

You'll need a loop.

An efficient solution would be something like the following:

    Map<Character, Character> map = new HashMap<Character, Character>();
    map.put('é', 'e');
    map.put('î', 'i');
    map.put('è', 'e');

    StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder();
    for (char c : text.toCharArray())
    {
        if (map.containsKey(c))
        {
            b.append(map.get(c));
        }
        else
        {
            b.append(c);
        }
    }
    String result = b.toString();

Of course in a real program you would encapsulate both the construction of the map and the replacement in their respective methods.