Removing accents from String

Question

Recentrly I found very helpful method in StringUtils library which is

StringUtils.stripAccents(String s)

I found it really helpful with removing any special characters and converting it to some ASCII "equivalent", for instace ç=c etc.

Now I am working for a German customer who really needs to do such a thing but only for non-German characters. Any umlauts should stay untouched. I realised that strinAccents won't be useful in that case.

Does anyone has some experience around that stuff? Are there any useful tools/libraries/classes or maybe regular expressions? I tried to write some class which is parsing and replacing such characters but it can be very difficult to build such map for all languages...

Any suggestions appriciated...

Answer 1

Best built a custom function. It can be like the following. If you want to avoid the conversion of a character, you can remove the relationship between the two strings (the constants).

private static final String UNICODE =
        "ÀàÈèÌìÒòÙùÁáÉéÍíÓóÚúÝýÂâÊêÎîÔôÛûŶŷÃãÕõÑñÄäËëÏïÖöÜüŸÿÅåÇçŐőŰű";
private static final String PLAIN_ASCII =
        "AaEeIiOoUuAaEeIiOoUuYyAaEeIiOoUuYyAaOoNnAaEeIiOoUuYyAaCcOoUu";

public static String toAsciiString(String str) {
    if (str == null) {
        return null;
    }
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    for (int index = 0; index < str.length(); index++) {
        char c = str.charAt(index);
        int pos = UNICODE.indexOf(c);
        if (pos > -1)
            sb.append(PLAIN_ASCII.charAt(pos));
        else {
            sb.append(c);
        }
    }
    return sb.toString();
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println(toAsciiString("Höchstalemannisch"));
}