how to replace special characters with the ones they're based on in PHP?

Question

How do I replace:

• "ã" with "a"
• "é" with "e"

in PHP? Is this possible? I've read somewhere I could do some math with the ascii value of the base character and the ascii value of the accent, but I can't find any references now.

Answer 1

If you don't have access to the Normalizer class or just don't wish to use it you can use the following function to replace most (all?) of the common accentuations.

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