how to replace special characters with the ones they're based on in PHP?

user_229965 0
Viewed 70929

How do I replace:

  • "ã" with "a"
  • "é" with "e"

in PHP? Is this possible? I've read somewhere I could do some math with the ascii value of the base character and the ascii value of the accent, but I can't find any references now.

special-characters character-encoding replace php string
8 Answers

If you don't have access to the Normalizer class or just don't wish to use it you can use the following function to replace most (all?) of the common accentuations.

function Unaccent($string)
{
    return preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
}
user_897710

This answer is incorrect. I didn't understand Unicode Normalization when I wrote it. Look at francadaval's comment and link

Check out the Normalizer class to do this. The documentation is good, so I'll just link it instead of repeating things here:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/class.normalizer.php

Specifically, the normalize member of that class:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/normalizer.normalize.php

Note that Unicode normalization has several forms, and you seem to want Normalization Form KD (NFKD) Compatibility Decomposition, though you should read the documentation to make sure.

You shouldn't try to roll your own function for this: There's way too many things that can go wrong, and using the provided function is a much better idea.

user_1190460

People often use str_replace or strtr and a big list of character to convert "from" and "to" -- even if that doesn't look quite pretty...

Another solution, I suppose, might be using something like iconv with the option //TRANSLIT -- but doesn't always work, from what I remember...

Also, if you are using PHP 5.3, the new Normalizer class might be interesting ;-)

user_1384750
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