how to replace special characters with the ones they're based on in PHP?

php string replace special-characters character-encoding
Carlos picture Carlos · Dec 11, 2009 · Viewed 66.5k times · Source

How do I replace:

  • "ã" with "a"
  • "é" with "e"

in PHP? Is this possible? I've read somewhere I could do some math with the ascii value of the base character and the ascii value of the accent, but I can't find any references now.

Answer

Alix Axel picture Alix Axel · Dec 11, 2009

If you don't have access to the Normalizer class or just don't wish to use it you can use the following function to replace most (all?) of the common accentuations.

function Unaccent($string)
{
    return preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
}

Related questions

PHP remove commas from numeric strings

In PHP, I have an array of variables that are ALL strings. Some of the values stored are numeric strings with commas. What I need: A way to trim the commas from strings, and ONLY do this for numeric strings. …

Read More
Replace last occurrence of a string in a string

Anyone know of a very fast way to replace the last occurrence of a string with another string in a string? Note, the last occurrence of the string might not be the last characters in the string. Example: $search = 'The'; $…

Read More
Remove a part of a string, but only when it is at the end of the string

I need to remove a substring of a string, but only when it is at the END of the string. for example, removing 'string' at the end of the following strings : "this is a test string" -> "this is …

Read More