You may
1) First, remove the accents :
the following comes from this topic :
Is there a way to get rid of accents and convert a whole string to regular letters? :
Use java.text.Normalizer to handle this for you.
string = Normalizer.normalize(string, Normalizer.Form.NFD);
This will separate all of the accent marks from the characters. Then,
you just need to compare each character against being a letter and
throw out the ones that aren't.
string = string.replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]", "");
If your text is in unicode, you should use this instead:
string = string.replaceAll("\\p{M}", "");
For unicode, \P{M} matches the base glyph and \p{M} (lowercase)
matches each accent.
2) Then, just put the remaining String
to lower case
string = string.toLowerCase();