Ignoring diacritic characters when comparing words with special characters (é, è, …)

Question

I have a list with some Belgian cities with diacritic characters: (Liège, Quiévrain, Franière, etc.) and I would like to transform these special characters to compare with a lis

Answer 1

For those looking for a clean java solution, use apache commons:

StringUtils.stripAccents("Liège").toUpperCase();

this will return

LIEGE