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

What I've done for similar substitutions is create a Map (usually HashMap) with the Unicode characters as the keys and their substitute as the values.

Pseudo-Java; the for depends on what sort of character container you're using as a parameter to the method that does this, e.g. String, CharSequence, etc.

StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();
for (each Character 'c' in inputString)
{
    Character replacement = xlateMap.get( c );
    output.append( replacement != null ? replacement : c );
}
return output.toString();

Anything in the Map is replaced, anything not in the Map is unchanged and copied to output.