Remove accents/diacritics in a string in JavaScript

Question

How do I remove accentuated characters from a string? Especially in IE6, I had something like this:

accentsTidy = function(s){
    var r=s.toLowerCase();
           


        

Answer 1

The format for new RegExp is

RegExp(something, 'modifiers');

So you would want

accentsTidy = function(s){
                        var r=s.toLowerCase();
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("\\s", 'g'),"");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("[àáâãäå]", 'g'),"a");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("æ", 'g'),"ae");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("ç", 'g'),"c");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("[èéêë]", 'g'),"e");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("[ìíîï]", 'g'),"i");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("ñ", 'g'),"n");                            
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("[òóôõö]", 'g'),"o");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("œ", 'g'),"oe");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("[ùúûü]", 'g'),"u");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("[ýÿ]", 'g'),"y");
                        r = r.replace(new RegExp("\\W", 'g'),"");
                        return r;
                };

Answer 2

You can use the _.deburr() method from the Lodash library.

It's available as a stand-alone NPM package lodash.deburr, or as part of the lodash package.

const myStringWithAccent = 'Mon café est plein de caféïne';
const myStringWithoutAccent = _.deburr( myStringWithAccent, );

The result will be : "Mon cafe est plein de cafeine"

Answer 3

There's a lot out there, but I think this one is simple and good enough:

 function remove_accents(strAccents) {
    var strAccents = strAccents.split('');
    var strAccentsOut = new Array();
    var strAccentsLen = strAccents.length;
    var accents =    "ÀÁÂÃÄÅàáâãäåÒÓÔÕÕÖØòóôõöøÈÉÊËèéêëðÇçÐÌÍÎÏìíîïÙÚÛÜùúûüÑñŠšŸÿýŽž";
    var accentsOut = "AAAAAAaaaaaaOOOOOOOooooooEEEEeeeeeCcDIIIIiiiiUUUUuuuuNnSsYyyZz";
    for (var y = 0; y < strAccentsLen; y++) {
        if (accents.indexOf(strAccents[y]) != -1) {
            strAccentsOut[y] = accentsOut.substr(accents.indexOf(strAccents[y]), 1);
        } else
            strAccentsOut[y] = strAccents[y];
    }
    strAccentsOut = strAccentsOut.join('');

    return strAccentsOut;
}

If you also want to remove special characters and transform spaces and hyphens in underscores, do this:

string = remove_accents(string);
string = string.replace(/[^a-z0-9\s]/gi, '').replace(/[-\s]/g, '_');

Answer 4

$scope.legal_name = $sanitize($scope.legal_name);
    console.log("Name before function...",$scope.legal_name);

    var str = "";
    for(var i=0; i < $scope.legal_name.length; i++) {
        var charName = $scope.legal_name.charAt(i);
        if((charName == '&') && ($scope.legal_name.charAt(i + 1) == '#')){
            var count = 0;
            var subString = "";
            while(true) {
                if(($scope.legal_name.charCodeAt(i + 2 + count) > 47) && ($scope.legal_name.charCodeAt(i + 1 + count) < 58 )) {
                    subString = subString + $scope.legal_name.charAt(i + 2 + count);
                    count++;
                } else {
                    if(subString.length > 0) {
                        var value = parseInt(subString);
                        str = str + String.fromCharCode(value);
                        i = i + 1 + count; 
                        break;
                    }
                }
            }               
        } else {
            str = str + charName;
        }
    }
    $scope.legal_name = str;
    console.log("Name After function...",str);

Answer 5

All the above isn't working with decomposed character as used on Mac OS. In order to remove diacritics in that case it is more simple :

r = r.replace(new RegExp(/[\u0300-\u036f]/g),"")

see comment from Olivier Miakinen on : https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fr.comp.lang.regexp/6IGJTbedGTM/G0sB2kAsR34J (posted in french)

Answer 6

normalize-diacritics is very useful

    const { normalize } = require('normalize-diacritics');
     
    /** Assuming top-level await is enabled... */
    await normalize('söme stüff with áccènts'); // 'some stuff with accents'