How can I convert non-ASCII characters encoded in UTF8 to ASCII-equivalent in Perl?

Question

I have a Perl script that is being called by third parties to send me names of people who have registered my software. One of these parties encodes the names in UTF-8, so I have adapted my script accordingly to decode UTF-8 to ASCII with Encode::decode_utf8(...).

This usually works fine, but every 6 months or so one of the names contains cyrillic, greek or romanian characters, so decoding the name results in garbage characters such as "Подражанская". I have to follow-up with the customer and ask him for a "latin character version" of his name in order to issue a registration code.

So, is there any Perl module that can detect whether there are such characters and automatically translates them to their closest ASCII representation if necessary?

It seems that I can use Lingua::Cyrillic::Translit::ICAO plus Lingua::DetectCharset to handle Cyrillic, but I would prefer something that works with other character sets as well.

Answer 1

If you have to deal with UTF-8 data that are not in the ascii range, your best bet is to change your backend so it doesn't choke on utf-8. How would you go about transliterating kanji signs?

Answer 2

I believe you could use Text::Unidecode for this, it is precisely what it tries to do.

Answer 3

If you get cyrilic text there is no "closest ASCII representation" for many characters.