Question

I need to convert Strings that consists of some letters specific to certain languages (like HÄSTDJUR – note Ä) to a String without those special letters (in this case HASTDJUR). How can I do it in Java? Thanks for help!

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It is not really about how it sounds. The scenario is following – you want to use the application, but don’t have the Swedish keyboard. So instead of looking at the character map, you type it by replacing special letters with the typical letters from the latin alphabet.

Answer 1

I think your question is the same as this one:

Java – getting rid of accents and converting them to regular letters

and hence the answer is also the same:

Solution

String convertedString = 
       Normalizer
           .normalize(input, Normalizer.Form.NFD)
           .replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]", "");

References

See

• JavaDoc: Normalizer.normalize(String, Normalizer.Form)
• JavaDoc: Normalizer.Form.NFD
• Sun Java Tutorial: Normalizer’s API

Example Code:

final String input = "Tĥïŝ ĩš â fůňķŷ Šťŕĭńġ";
System.out.println(
    Normalizer
        .normalize(input, Normalizer.Form.NFD)
        .replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]", "")
);

Output:

This is a funky String