Replacing accented characters with plain ascii ones [duplicate]

Answer 1

Since those characters have no mathematical relation to their 'plain equivalents' in the unicode table you will have to replace them manually using something like this:

function cleanUpSpecialChars(str)
{
    return str
        .replace(/[ÀÁÂÃÄÅ]/g,"A")
        .replace(/[àáâãäå]/g,"a")
        .replace(/[ÈÉÊË]/g,"E")
        //.... all the rest
        .replace(/[^a-z0-9]/gi,''); // final clean up
}

The case-insensitve option doesn't work on those characters, so you have to do it for the lower and upper case variants of them.