How to remove diacritics from text?

Question

I am making a swedish website, and swedish letters are å, ä, and ö.

I need to make a string entered by a user to become url-safe with PHP.

Basically, need to

Answer 1

You don't need fancy regexps to filter the swedish chars, just use the strtr function to "translate" them, like:

$your_URL = "www.mäåö.com";
$good_URL = strtr($your_URL, "äåöë etc...", "aaoe etc...");
echo $good_URL;

->output: www.maao.com :)

Answer 2

This should be useful which handles almost all the cases.

function Unaccent($string)
{
    return preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(?:acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml|caron);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'));
}

Answer 3

and all swedish should be converted like this:

'å' to 'a' and 'ä' to 'a' and 'ö' to 'o' (just remove the dots above).

Use normalizer_normalize() to get rid of diacritical marks.

The rest should become underscores as I said.

Use preg_replace() with a pattern of [\W] (i.o.w: any character which doesn't match letters, digits or underscore) to replace them by underscores.

Final result should look like:

$data = preg_replace('[\W]', '_', normalizer_normalize($data));