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Benjamin Delespierre
Benjamin Delespierre

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Convert accentuated character to their ASCII equivalent in PHP

#php #utf8 #accents #accentuated

A a french developer, I often come across non-ASCII characters in user-input data. In order to generate clean, search friendly equivalents, I created the following function that removes the accents while preserving the string integrity.

Example 

$str = "À l'île, en été, quelle félicité !"; echo accent2ascii($str); // A l'ile, en ete, quelle felicite
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The function 

/** * Converts accentuated characters (àéïöû etc.) * to their ASCII equivalent (aeiou etc.) * * @param string $str * @param string $charset * @return string */ function accent2ascii(string $str, string $charset = 'utf-8'): string { $str = htmlentities($str, ENT_NOQUOTES, $charset); $str = preg_replace('#&([A-za-z])(?:acute|cedil|caron|circ|grave|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);#', '\1', $str); $str = preg_replace('#&([A-za-z]{2})(?:lig);#', '\1', $str); // pour les ligatures e.g. 'œ' $str = preg_replace('#&[^;]+;#', '', $str); // supprime les autres caractères return $str; }
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Top comments (2)

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suckup_de profile image
Lars Moelleken • 
<?php $str = "À l'île, en été, quelle félicité !"; var_dump(transliterator_transliterate('NFKC; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFKC; Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII', $str));

(3v4l.org/H3DAb)

If the "intl" php extension is not installed or you need something language specific you can also use this package: github.com/voku/portable-ascii

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bdelespierre profile image
Benjamin Delespierre •

Nice job you did there!