php iconv translit for removing accents: not working as excepted?

Question

consider this simple code:

echo iconv(\'UTF-8\', \'ASCII//TRANSLIT\', \'è\');

it prints

 `e

instead of ju

Answer 1

cf @tchrist, with INTL php extension

http://fr2.php.net/manual/en/book.intl.php

preg_replace('/\pM*/u','',normalizer_normalize( $mystring, Normalizer::FORM_D));

eéèêëiîïoöôuùûüaâäÅ Ἥ ŐǟǠ ǺƶƈƉųŪŧȬƀ␢ĦŁȽŦ ƀǖ becomes

eeeeeiiiooouuuuaaaA Η OaA AƶƈƉuUŧOƀ␢ĦŁȽŦ ƀu

---

As tchrist emphasises, not all unicode characters are considered decomposable:

extract from Unicode charts:

U0080.pdf

00CF Ï LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DIAERESIS

≡ 0049 I 0308 ¨

NB this symbol « ≡ » indicate an available decomposition

00D0 Ð LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ETH

→ 00F0 ð latin small letter eth

→ 0110 Đ latin capital letter d with stroke

→ 0189 Ɖ latin capital letter african d

no decomposition available, IMHO strangely (we could consider ASCII letter D as an acceptable equivalent).

U0100.pdf

0110 Đ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH STROKE

→ 00D0 Ð latin capital letter eth

→ 0111 đ latin small letter d with stroke

→ 0189 Ɖ latin capital letter african d

even stranger: this one is identified as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D (with stroke), but not decomposable as such! Perhaps a cooler solution should be to get the unicode description of each char, and compare it with the description of each ascii char (and replace accordingly). Anyone? ;-]

cf http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt