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

Just bumped into this, maybe its too late, but here is what worked for me:

// text is the input string, and this just removes accents from the letters

// lossy encoding turns accented letters into normal letters
NSMutableData *sanitizedData = [text dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding
                                  allowLossyConversion:YES];

// increase length by 1 adds a 0 byte (increaseLengthBy 
// guarantees to fill the new space with 0s), effectively turning 
// sanitizedData into a c-string
[sanitizedData increaseLengthBy:1];

// now we just create a string with the c-string in sanitizedData
NSString *final = [NSString stringWithCString:[sanitizedData bytes]];