Question

Related questions:

1. How to replace characters in a java String?
2. How to replace special characters with their equivalent (such as " á " for " a") in C#?

As in the questions above, I’m looking for a reliable, robust way to reduce any unicode character to near-equivalent ASCII using PHP. I really want to avoid rolling my own look up table.

For example (stolen from 1st referenced question): Gračišće becomes Gracisce

Answer 1

The iconv module can do this, more specifically, the iconv() function:

$str = iconv('Windows-1252', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', "Gracišce");
echo $str;
//outputs "Gracisce"

The main hassle with iconv is that you just have to watch your encodings, but it’s definitely the right tool for the job (I used ‘Windows-1252’ for the example due to limitations of the text editor I was working with 😉 The feature of iconv that you definitely want to use is the //TRANSLIT flag, which tells iconv to transliterate any characters that don’t have an ASCII match into the closest approximation.