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

If you still need that for Android API 8 or lower (Android 2.2, Java 1.5) where you don't have Normalizer class, here's my code, I think better to modify than Pentium10 answer:

public class StringAccentRemover {

    @SuppressWarnings("serial")
    private static final HashMap accents  = new HashMap(){
        {
            put('Ą', 'A');
            put('Ę', 'E');
            put('Ć', 'C');
            put('Ł', 'L');
            put('Ń', 'N');
            put('Ó', 'O');
            put('Ś', 'S');
            put('Ż', 'Z');
            put('Ź', 'Z');

            put('ą', 'a');
            put('ę', 'e');
            put('ć', 'c');
            put('ł', 'l');
            put('ń', 'n');
            put('ó', 'o');
            put('ś', 's');
            put('ż', 'z');
            put('ź', 'z');
        }
    };
    /**
     * remove accented from a string and replace with ascii equivalent
     */
    public static String removeAccents(String s) {
        char[] result = s.toCharArray();
        for(int i=0; i