Replacing accented characters php

Question

I am trying to replace accented characters with the normal replacements. Below is what I am currently doing.

    $string = \"Éric Cantona\";
    $strict = st         


        

Answer 1

I know, that question has been asked a long long time ago...

I was looking for a short and elegant solution, but couldn't find satisfaction for two reasons:

First, most of the existing solutions replace a list of characters by a list of other characters. Unfortunately, it require to use a specific encoding for the php script file itself which might be unwanted.

Second, using iconv seems to be a good way, but it's not enough as the result of a converted character could be one or two characters, or a Fatal Exception.

So I wrote that small function which does the job :

function replaceAccent($string, $replacement = '_')
{
    $alnumPattern = '/^[a-zA-Z0-9 ]+$/';

    if (preg_match($alnumPattern, $string)) {
        return $string;
    }

    $ret = array_map(
        function ($chr) use ($alnumPattern, $replacement) {
            if (preg_match($alnumPattern, $chr)) {
                return $chr;
            } else {
                $chr = @iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $chr);
                if (strlen($chr) == 1) {
                    return $chr;
                } elseif (strlen($chr) > 1) {
                    $ret = '';
                    foreach (str_split($chr) as $char2) {
                        if (preg_match($alnumPattern, $char2)) {
                            $ret .= $char2;
                        }
                    }
                    return $ret;
                } else {
                    // replace whatever iconv fail to convert by something else
                    return $replacement;
                }
            }
        },
        str_split($string)
    );

    return implode($ret);
}