Convert accented characters into ascii character

r transliteration
userJT picture userJT · Nov 28, 2012 · Viewed 11k times · Source

What is the optimal way to to remove German (or French) accents from a vector of 16 million string variables.

e.g., 'Sjögren's syndrome' into 'Sjogren's syndrome'

Converstion of single character into a single character is better then transliteration such as

ä => ae ö => oe ü => ue.

e.g., using regular expression would be one option but is there something better (R package for this)?

gsub('ü','u',gsub('ö','o',"Sjögren's syndrome ( über) "))

There are SO solutions for non-R platforms but not a good one for R.

Answer

James picture James · Nov 28, 2012

Use iconv to convert to ASCII with transliteration (if supported):

iconv(c("über","Sjögren's"),to="ASCII//TRANSLIT")
[1] "uber"      "Sjogren's"

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