How to convert special characters to normal characters?

Question

I am trying to convert characters like:

ë, ä, ï, ö, etc.

To normal characters like:

e, a, i, o, etc.

What

Answer 1

try this .. works for me.

iconv('utf-8', 'ascii//TRANSLIT', $text);

Answer 2

For example, it is create a simple readable URL from a content title:

function cleanurl($title) {
        return urlencode(strtolower(str_replace(" ","-",preg_replace("/&([a-z])[a-z]+;/i", "$1", htmlentities($title)))));
}

Answer 3

i like stewies' answer, but for completeness this works for me.

preg_replace("/&([a-z])[a-z]+;/i", "$1", htmlentities($foo));