Question

I have a tr command that is supposed to transliterate special characters into standard [a-z][A-Z] characters, because I’m tidying up input for something that can’t accept special characters such as ÊÌÐÑÖØÙÜÝßàåæçèîïðõ.

However, it’s not working as expected for my test input.

Command:

Input is Bío-Bío, in the echo command.

echo "Bío-Bío" | tr [ŠŒŽšœžŸ¥µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ] [SOZsozYYuAAAAAAACEEEEIIIIDNOOOOOOUUUUYsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiionoooooouuuuyy]

Actual Output:

B]]o-B]]o

Desired Output:

Bio-Bio

Can anyone give me any insight into why this is happening?

EDIT0:
I have checked and confirmed both strings in the tr command are the same length (69 characters).

Answer 1

The tr command does not understand UTF8.

You might have better luck using iconv:

echo "Bío-Bío" | iconv -f utf8 -t ascii//translit