Converting foreign characters to normal

Question

I have an international photo website. When the office uploads photos that have come from abroad, the captions and headlines sometimes have foreign characters, such as:

1. François Hollande
2. ValŽrie Trierweiler

And these get stored in the database (MySQL – latin1_swedish_ci), as-is. Now, when it comes to searching for Francois, without the French characters, in plain English, those particular photos do not display.

Now this isn't just a problem with French characters – it's other countries too. How is this possible, before I submit to my database, to convert these foreign characters to normal ones, like:

Francois Hollande

There is a PHP module named translit http://pecl.php.net/package/translit, perhaps you can get inspiration from there. — wroniasty, Sep 18 '12 at 15:54

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 18 '12 at 19:03

You can do it using Adodb.Stream with ascii charset. Here is an example:

With Server.CreateObject("Adodb.Stream")
    .Charset = "ascii"
    .Open
    .WriteText "François Hollande ValŽrie Trierweiler ÖÇŞİĞÜöçşığü ôûõòùìñ"
    .Position = 0
    Response.Write .ReadText
End With

Above script must print Francois Hollande ValZrie Trierweiler OCSIGUocsigu ouoouin exactly.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '14 at 16:31

1

And like this it can be a function

Function unaccent(strg)
    With Server.CreateObject("Adodb.Stream")
    .Charset = "ascii"
    .Open
    .WriteText strg
    .Position = 0
    unaccent = .ReadText
    End With
End Function

answered Jan 17 '14 at 16:31

George SEDRA

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

0

This answer will most probably cover your case.

You don't need an external library, and you can check for conformance using a numerous of methods, using regexes being my personal preference for not too large strings.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

Community

1
1

answered Sep 18 '12 at 16:17

Mihalis Bagos

2,500
1
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Converting foreign characters to normal

3 Answers3