Compare strings ignoring accented characters [duplicate]

Question

I would like to know if there is a method that compares 2 strings and ignores the accents making "noção" equal to "nocao". it would be something like string1.methodCompareIgnoreAccent(string2);

Answer 1

You can use java Collators for comparing the tests ignoring the accent, see a simple example:

import java.text.Collator;

/**
 * @author Kennedy
 */
public class SimpleTest
{

  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    String a = "nocao";
    String b = "noção";

    final Collator instance = Collator.getInstance();

    // This strategy mean it'll ignore the accents
    instance.setStrength(Collator.NO_DECOMPOSITION);

    // Will print 0 because its EQUAL
    System.out.println(instance.compare(a, b));
  }
}

Documentation: JavaDoc

I'll not explain in details because i used just a little of Collators and i'm not a expert in it, but you can google there's some articles about it.

Answer 2

There is no built in method to do this, so you have to build your own:

A part of this is solution is from here : This first splits all accented characters into their deAccented counterparts followed by their combining diacritics. Then you simply remove all combining diacritics. Also see https://stackoverflow.com/a/1215117/4095834

And then your equals method will look like this:

import java.text.Normalizer;
import java.text.Normalizer.Form;

public boolean equals(Object o) {
    // Code omitted
    if (yourField.equals(removeAccents(anotherField))) {
        return true;
    }
}

public static String removeAccents(String text) {
    return text == null ? null : Normalizer.normalize(text, Form.NFD)
            .replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "");
}