NSString - Convert to pure alphabet only (i.e. remove accents+punctuation)

Question

I\'m trying to compare names without any punctuation, spaces, accents etc. At the moment I am doing the following:

-(NSString*) prepareString:(NSString*)a {
         


        

Answer 1

On a similar question, Ole Begemann suggests using stringByFoldingWithOptions: and I believe this is the best solution here:

NSString *accentedString = @"ÁlgeBra";
NSString *unaccentedString = [accentedString stringByFoldingWithOptions:NSDiacriticInsensitiveSearch locale:[NSLocale currentLocale]];

Depending on the nature of the strings you want to convert, you might want to set a fixed locale (e.g. English) instead of using the user's current locale. That way, you can be sure to get the same results on every machine.