Code to strip diacritical marks using ICU

Question

Can somebody please provide some sample code to strip diacritical marks (i.e., replace characters having accents, umlauts, etc., with their unaccented, unumlauted, etc., character equivalents, e.g., every accented é would become a plain ASCII e) from a UnicodeString using the ICU library in C++? E.g.:

UnicodeString strip_diacritics( UnicodeString const &s ) {
    UnicodeString result;
    // ...
    return result;
}

Assume that s has already been normalized. Thanks.

Answer 1

ICU lets you transliterate a string using a specific rule. My rule is NFD; [:M:] Remove; NFC: decompose, remove diacritics, recompose. The following code takes an UTF-8 std::string as an input and returns another UTF-8 std::string:

#include <unicode/utypes.h>
#include <unicode/unistr.h>
#include <unicode/translit.h>

std::string desaxUTF8(const std::string& str) {
    // UTF-8 std::string -> UTF-16 UnicodeString
    UnicodeString source = UnicodeString::fromUTF8(StringPiece(str));

    // Transliterate UTF-16 UnicodeString
    UErrorCode status = U_ZERO_ERROR;
    Transliterator *accentsConverter = Transliterator::createInstance(
        "NFD; [:M:] Remove; NFC", UTRANS_FORWARD, status);
    accentsConverter->transliterate(source);
    // TODO: handle errors with status

    // UTF-16 UnicodeString -> UTF-8 std::string
    std::string result;
    source.toUTF8String(result);

    return result;
}