How can I change extended latin characters to their unaccented ASCII equivalents?

Question

I need a generic transliteration or substitution regex that will map extended latin characters to similar looking ASCII characters, and all other extended characters to \'\'

Answer 1

Text::Unaccent or alternatively Text::Unaccent::PurePerl sounds like what you're asking for, at least the first half of it.

$unaccented = unac_string($charset, $string);

Removing all non-ASCII characters would be a relatively simple.

s/[^\000-\177]+//g;