How to remove accents from string in C?

Question

Is there is a more efficient way to remove accents from string without make an big array with the characters to replace?

For example:

removeaccents("áèfoo")

Output:

aefoo

In the ASCII table there no accents, I have no idea how to do this. Thanks in advance. :)

You can always use an if ladder instead of a translation table. — Hot Licks, Mar 14 '12 at 03:11
possible help question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/144761/how-to-remove-accents-and-tilde-in-a-c-stdstring — chikuba, Mar 14 '12 at 06:09
@chikuba: It's not a duplicate - that question is about C++, while this is about C. — Timothy Jones, Mar 14 '12 at 06:10
`"áèfoo"` is not a valid string literal. what dfo you really want? — Jasen, Aug 22 '20 at 00:46

Timothy Jones · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-14T23:03:35.837

8

Sounds like you're looking for unac(). From the man page:

unac is a C library that removes accents from characters, regardless of the character set (ISO-8859-15, ISO-CELTIC, KOI8-RU...) as long as iconv(3) is able to convert it into UTF-16 (Unicode).

I couldn't find the download page (I think it's meant to be here, but the link is currently 404ing). If you're on ubuntu, you can get it with:

sudo apt-get install libunac1-dev

Assuming you're using gcc, once it's installed you'll need to add -lunac to your compiler options (to tell the compiler to link with the unac library).

edited Mar 14 '12 at 23:03

answered Mar 14 '12 at 06:03

Timothy Jones

21,495
6
60
90

Thanks very much. :) I downloaded and installed, but when I try link and compile I get the following error: `/tmp/ccAKGVl9.o: In function `main': ILD.c:(.text+0x651): undefined reference to `unac_string' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status ` my code: `#include // ... char* out = 0; size_t out_length = 0; if(unac_string("ISO-8859-1", "été", strlen("été"), &out, &out_length)) { printf("unac_string"); } else { printf("%.*s0", out_length, out); free(out); }` – Jack Mar 14 '12 at 15:59
I solved using `-lunac` option on `gcc` and changed `ISO-8859-1` to `UTF-8` encoding and works fine now. Thanks you very much :) – Jack Mar 14 '12 at 21:02

How to remove accents from string in C?

1 Answers1