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

When I would like translate some string, not only chars, I'm using this approach:

my %trans = (
  'é' => 'e',
  'ê' => 'e',
  'á' => 'a',
  'ç' => 'c',
  'Ď' => 'D',
  map +($_=>''), qw(‡ Ω ‰)
};

my $re = qr/${ \(join'|', map quotemeta, keys %trans)}/;

s/($re)/$trans{$1}/ge;

If you want some more complicated you can use functions instead string constants. With this approach you can do anything what you want. But for your case tr should be more effective:

tr/éêáçĎ/eeacD/;
tr/‡Ω‰//d;