Question

How can I replace diacritics (ă,ş,ţ etc) with their “normal” form (a,s,t) in javascript?

Answer 1

If you want to do it entirely on the client side, I think your only option is with some kind of lookup table. Here’s a starting point, written by a chap called Olavi Ivask on his blog…

function replaceDiacritics(s)
{
    var s;

    var diacritics =[
        /[\300-\306]/g, /[\340-\346]/g,  // A, a
        /[\310-\313]/g, /[\350-\353]/g,  // E, e
        /[\314-\317]/g, /[\354-\357]/g,  // I, i
        /[\322-\330]/g, /[\362-\370]/g,  // O, o
        /[\331-\334]/g, /[\371-\374]/g,  // U, u
        /[\321]/g, /[\361]/g, // N, n
        /[\307]/g, /[\347]/g, // C, c
    ];

    var chars = ['A','a','E','e','I','i','O','o','U','u','N','n','C','c'];

    for (var i = 0; i < diacritics.length; i++)
    {
        s = s.replace(diacritics[i],chars[i]);
    }

    document.write(s);
}

You can see this is simply an array of regexes for known diacritic chars, mapping them back onto a “plain” character.