How to Replace Special Characters with Their Base Equivalents in PHP?

Replacing Special Characters with Their Base Equivalents in PHP

Question: Is it possible to replace special characters with their base equivalents in PHP, such as converting "ã" to "a" and "é" to "e"?

Answer: Yes, it is possible to replace accented characters with their base equivalents using PHP.

Method:

If you have access to the Normalizer class, you can use the Normalizer::normalize() method with the Normalizer::FORM_D constant:

<code class="php">$string = "ãé";
$baseString = Normalizer::normalize($string, Normalizer::FORM_D);</code>

If you don't have access to the Normalizer class, you can use the following function:

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

This function converts HTML entities to their corresponding characters and then removes common accent marks using regular expressions.

Example:

<code class="php">$string = "ãé";
$baseString = Unaccent($string);</code>

The resulting $baseString variable will contain "ae".

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