Question

I’m dealing with a 3rd party API / Web Service and they only allow latin-1 character set in their XML. Is there an existing API / method that will find and replace all non-latin-1 characters in a String?

For example: Kévin

Is there anyway to make that Kevin?

Answer 1

Using ICU4J,

public String removeAccents(String text) {
    return Normalizer.decompose(text, false, 0)
                 .replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "");
}

I found this example at http://glaforge.appspot.com/article/how-to-remove-accents-from-a-string

In java 1.6 the necessary normalizer might be built-in.