Replace foreign characters

Question

I need to be able to replace some common foreign characters with English equivalents before I store values into my db.

For example: æ replace with <

Answer 1

Excuse me second-guessing why you're doing this, but..

If this is for search matching: The point of character set collation in a MySQL (for example), is that you can search for "n" and still match "ñ"

IF this is for display purposes: I'd recommend if you have to do this, you do it when you display the text to a user. You can never get your original data back otherwise.

Answer 2

For single character of accents

$str = strtr($str, 
  "ÀÁÂÃÄÅÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕÖØÝßàáâãäåçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ",
  "AAAAAACEEEEIIIINOOOOOOYSaaaaaaceeeeiiiinoooooouuuuyy"); 

For double character of accents (such as Æ, æ)

$match   = array('æ', 'Æ');
$replace = array('ae', 'AE');
$str = str_replace($replace, $replace, $str);

Answer 3

You can define your convertable characters in an array, and use str_replace():

$conversions = array(
    "æ" => "ae",
    "ñ" => "n",
);

$text = str_replace(array_keys($conversions), $conversions, $text);

Answer 4

You can try iconv() with ASCII//TRANSLIT:

$text = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $text);