PHP remove accents

Question

What is the most efficient way to remove accents from a string eg.

"ÈâuÑ" becomes "Eaun"

Is there a simple, built in way that I'm missing or a regular expression?

Answer 1

If you have iconv installed, try this (the example assumes your input string is in UTF-8):

echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);

(iconv is a library to convert between all kinds of encodings; it's efficient and included with many PHP distributions by default. Most of all, it's definitely easier and more error-proof than trying to roll your own solution (did you know that there's a "Latin letter N with a curl"? Me neither.))

Answer 2

You can use iconv to transliterate the characters to plain US-ASCII and then use a regular expression to remove non-alphabetic characters:

preg_replace('/[^a-z]/i', '', iconv("UTF-8", "US-ASCII//TRANSLIT", $text))

Another way would be using the Normalizer to normalize to the Normalization Form KD (NFKD) and then remove the mark characters:

preg_replace('/\p{Mn}/u', '', Normalizer::normalize($text, Normalizer::FORM_KD))