How to Convert Special Chars to Standard Chars?

Question

I\'m looking for way to convert chars like āžšķūņrūķīš to azskunrukis. In other words, to replace ā with a, ž with z an

Answer 1

Take a look at iconv's transliteration capabilities:

The above example will output something similar to:

Original : This is the Euro symbol '€'.
TRANSLIT : This is the Euro symbol 'EUR'.
IGNORE : This is the Euro symbol ''.
Plain :
Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string in .\iconv-example.php on line 7
This is the Euro symbol '

Your example text can be tranliterated using:

$translit = iconv('UTF-8', 'US-ASCII//TRANSLIT', 'āžšķūņrūķīš');

Here's an example with the text you provided: http://ideone.com/MJHvf