Replace foreign characters

Question

I need to be able to replace some common foreign characters with English equivalents before I store values into my db.

For example: æ replace with <

Answer 1

Excuse me second-guessing why you're doing this, but..

If this is for search matching: The point of character set collation in a MySQL (for example), is that you can search for "n" and still match "ñ"

IF this is for display purposes: I'd recommend if you have to do this, you do it when you display the text to a user. You can never get your original data back otherwise.