php iconv translit for removing accents: not working as excepted?

Question

consider this simple code:

echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', 'è');

it prints

 `e

instead of just

 e

do you know what I am doing wrong?

---

nothing changed after adding setlocale

setlocale(LC_COLLATE, 'en_US.utf8');
echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', 'è');

Answer 1

I have this standard function to return valid url strings without the invalid url characters. The magic seems to be in the line after the //remove unwanted characters comment.

This is taken from the Symfony framework documentation: http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/08 which in turn is taken from http://php.vrana.cz/vytvoreni-pratelskeho-url.php but i don't speak Czech ;-)

function slugify($text)
{
  // replace non letter or digits by -
  $text = preg_replace('#[^\\pL\d]+#u', '-', $text);

  // trim
  $text = trim($text, '-');

  // transliterate
  if (function_exists('iconv'))
  {
    $text = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//TRANSLIT', $text);
  }

  // lowercase
  $text = strtolower($text);

  // remove unwanted characters
  $text = preg_replace('#[^-\w]+#', '', $text);

  if (empty($text))
  {
    return 'n-a';
  }

  return $text;
}

echo slugify('é'); // --> "e"