php iconv translit for removing accents: not working as excepted?

Question

consider this simple code:

echo iconv(\'UTF-8\', \'ASCII//TRANSLIT\', \'è\');

it prints

 `e

instead of ju

Answer 1

I'm tempted to say "nothing", although this is a little outside my expertise. PHP's iconv() is notorious, and the inspiration for many workarounds, including

• dropping to the system's iconv utility (Unix & Linux)
• crafting a lookup table
• replacing all accented characters with an ASCII equivalent as kind of a preprocessing stage
• setting LC_COLLATE (which doesn't seem to work for everyone)
• use htmlentities() instead of iconv()

Read the comments for iconv() documentation for more inspiration. (Or commiseration. Too close to call.)