Ignoring diacritic characters when comparing words with special characters (é, è, …)

Question

I have a list with some Belgian cities with diacritic characters: (Liège, Quiévrain, Franière, etc.) and I would like to transform these special characters to compare with a lis

Answer 1

As of Java 6, you can use java.text.Normalizer:

public String unaccent(String s) {
    String normalized = Normalizer.normalize(s, Normalizer.Form.NFD);
    return normalized.replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]", "");
}

Note that in Java 5 there is also a sun.text.Normalizer, but its use is strongly discouraged since it's part of Sun's proprietary API and has been removed in Java 6.