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

These answers didn't work as expected for me. Specifically, decomposedStringWithCanonicalMapping didn't strip accents/umlauts as I'd expected.

Here's a variation on what I used that answers the brief:

// replace accents, umlauts etc with equivalent letter i.e 'é' becomes 'e'.
// Always use en_GB (or a locale without the characters you wish to strip) as locale, no matter which language we're taking as input
NSString *processedString = [string stringByFoldingWithOptions: NSDiacriticInsensitiveSearch locale: [NSLocale localeWithLocaleIdentifier: @"en_GB"]];
// remove non-letters
processedString = [[processedString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[[NSCharacterSet letterCharacterSet] invertedSet]] componentsJoinedByString:@""];
// trim whitespace
processedString = [processedString stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet: [NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet]];
return processedString;