Question

Is there is a more efficient way to remove accents from string without make an big array with the characters to replace?

For example:

removeaccents("áèfoo")

Output:

aefoo

In the ASCII table there no accents, I have no idea how to do this. Thanks in advance. 🙂

Answer 1

Sounds like you’re looking for unac(). From the man page:

unac is a C library that removes accents from characters, regardless of the character set (ISO-8859-15, ISO-CELTIC, KOI8-RU…) as long as iconv(3) is able to convert it
into UTF-16 (Unicode).

I couldn’t find the download page (I think it’s meant to be here, but the link is currently 404ing). If you’re on ubuntu, you can get it with:

sudo apt-get install libunac1-dev

Assuming you’re using gcc, once it’s installed you’ll need to add -lunac to your compiler options (to tell the compiler to link with the unac library).