Replace German characters (umlauts, accents) with english equivalents

Question

Replace German characters (umlauts, accents) with english equivalents

I need to remove any german specific characters from various fields of text for processing into another system which wont accept them as valid.

So the characters I am aware of are:

ß ä ö ü Ä Ö Ü

At the moment I have a bit of a manual way of replacing them:

myGermanString.Replace("ä","a").Replace("ö","o").Replace("ü","u").....

But I was hoping there was a simpler / more efficient way of doing it. Since I'll be doing it on thousands of strings per run, 99% of which will not contain these chars.

Maybe a method involving some sort of CultureInfo?

(for example, according to MS, the following returns the strings are equal

String.Compare("Straße", "Strasse", StringComparison.CurrentCulture);

so there must be some sort of conversion table already existing?)

Answer 1

@Barry's answer is good if you want to remove the diacritics.

But in German it's usual to replace ü => ue, ö => oe etc.

Here's a link to a similar question.

Answer 2

The process is known as removing "diacritics" - see Removing diacritics (accents) from strings which uses the following code:

public static String RemoveDiacritics(String s)
{
  String normalizedString = s.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD);
  StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

  for (int i = 0; i < normalizedString.Length; i++)
  {
    Char c = normalizedString[i];
    if (CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(c) != UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark)
      stringBuilder.Append(c);
  }

  return stringBuilder.ToString();
}

Answer 3

From the article mentioned by jb http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2006/10/30/removing-diacritics-accents-from-strings.aspx

public static String RemoveDiacritics(String s)
{
  String normalizedString = s.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD);
  StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

  for (int i = 0; i < normalizedString.Length; i++)
  {
    Char c = normalizedString[i];
    if (CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(c) != UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark)
      stringBuilder.Append(c);
  }

  return stringBuilder.ToString();
}