Replacing unicode punctuation with ASCII approximations

Question

I am reading some text files in a Java program and would like to replace some Unicode characters with ASCII approximations. These files will eventually be broken into sente

Answer 1

While this does not exactly answers your question, you can convert your Unicode text to US-ASCII replacing non-ASCII characters with '?' symbols.

String input = "aáeéiíoóuú"; // 10 chars.

Charset ch = Charset.forName("US-ASCII");
CharsetEncoder enc = ch.newEncoder();
enc.onUnmappableCharacter(CodingErrorAction.REPLACE);
enc.replaceWith(new byte[]{'?'});

ByteBuffer out = null;

try {
    out = enc.encode(CharBuffer.wrap(input));
} catch (CharacterCodingException e) { 
    /* ignored, shouldn't happen */ 
}

String outStr = ch.decode(out).toString();

// Prints "a?e?i?o?u?"
System.out.println(outStr);