Convert 2 similarly-looking German characters of different kinds to same ASCII string in PHP

Question

I have these two strings:

$str1 = \'Ö\';
$str2 = \'Ö\';
$e1 = mb_detect_encoding($str1);
$e2 = mb_detect_encoding($str2);
var_dump($str1);
var_dump($str2);
         


        

Answer 1

Extending Andreas's answer. These characters are letter + combining diaeresis(U-0308). I was able to search and replace them to standard umlauts, then replace with whatever is needed. This is the fuction I've used to replace them:

function convertToUmlauts($str) {
    $srp_array = ['Ö' => 'Ö', 'Ä' => 'Ä', 'Ü' => 'Ü', '̈a' => 'ä', 'ö' => 'ö', 'ü' => 'ü'];
    return strtr($str, $srp_array);
}