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

You can use man iso_8859_1 (or your char set) or od -bc to identify the the octal representation of the diacritic. Then use gawk to do the replacing.

{ gsub(/\344/,"a"; print $0 }

This replaces ä with a.

Answer 2

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

tr 'āáǎàēéěèīíǐì...' 'aaaaeeeeiii...' <infile >outfile

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

Answer 3

This might work for you:

sed -i 'y/āáǎàēéěèīíǐìōóǒòūúǔùǖǘǚǜĀÁǍÀĒÉĚÈĪÍǏÌŌÓǑÒŪÚǓÙǕǗǙǛ/aaaaeeeeiiiioooouuuuüüüüAAAAEEEEIIIIOOOOUUUUÜÜÜÜ/' file