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

One important precision over the answer of BillyTheKid18756 (that was corrected by Luiz but it was not obvious in the explanation of the code):

DO NOT USE stringWithCString as a second step to remove accents, it can add unwanted characters at the end of your string as the NSData is not NULL-terminated (as stringWithCString expects it). Or use it and add an additional NULL byte to your NSData, like Luiz did in his code.

I think a simpler answer is to replace:

NSString *sanitizedText = [NSString stringWithCString:[sanitizedData bytes] encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];

By:

NSString *sanitizedText = [[[NSString alloc] initWithData:sanitizedData encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding] autorelease];

If I take back the code of BillyTheKid18756, here is the complete correct code:

// The input text
NSString *text = @"BûvérÈ!@$&%^&(*^(_()-*/48";

// Defining what characters to accept
NSMutableCharacterSet *acceptedCharacters = [[NSMutableCharacterSet alloc] init];
[acceptedCharacters formUnionWithCharacterSet:[NSCharacterSet letterCharacterSet]];
[acceptedCharacters formUnionWithCharacterSet:[NSCharacterSet decimalDigitCharacterSet]];
[acceptedCharacters addCharactersInString:@" _-.!"];

// Turn accented letters into normal letters (optional)
NSData *sanitizedData = [text dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES];
// Corrected back-conversion from NSData to NSString
NSString *sanitizedText = [[[NSString alloc] initWithData:sanitizedData encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding] autorelease];

// Removing unaccepted characters
NSString* output = [[sanitizedText componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[acceptedCharacters invertedSet]] componentsJoinedByString:@""];