How to remove all of the diacritics from a file?

Question

I have a file containing many vowels with diacritics. I need to make these replacements:

• Replace ā, á, ǎ, and à with a.
• Replace ē, é, ě, and è with

Answer 1

For this the tr(1) command is for. For example:

tr 'āáǎàēéěèīíǐì...' 'aaaaeeeeiii...' outfile

You may have to check/change your LANG environment variable to match the character set being used.