Convert non-ASCII characters (umlauts, accents...) to their closest ASCII equivalent (slug creation)

Question

I am looking for way in JavaScript to convert non-ASCII characters in a string to their closest equivalent, similarly to what the PHP iconv function does. For instance if the input string is Rånades på Skyttis i Ö-vik, it should be converted to Ranades pa skyttis i o-vik. I had a look at phpjs but iconv isn't included.

Is it possible to perform such conversion in JavaScript, if so how?

Related (but not a real blanket solution): [remove umlauts or specialchars in javascript string](http://stackoverflow.com/q/4804885) — Pekka, Aug 05 '12 at 11:08
This *may* not be natively possible in JavaScript without maintaining huge replacement tables (at least, I've never seen a method to do it). There is no way to send the data to a server and use iconv there? — Pekka, Aug 05 '12 at 11:10
I've once created a function doing this. See http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/112070, Ctrl+F "`var RW759_normalize_accents`". It's used to normalize characters for searches, I manually selected the characters iirc with a tool made for the specific purpose. Based on [this Q&A](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/227950/programatic-accent-reduction-in-javascript-aka-text-normalization-or-unaccentin) — Rob W, Aug 05 '12 at 11:18
@Pekka: don't you think that by editing the title, you've reduced the scope of the question? I initially had written `non-ASCII characters` which you replaced with `characters with umlauts/accents`. For me there are plenty of other characters than `umlauts` and `accents` which should also be converted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic. Maybe Rephrasing title as `Convert non-ASCII characters (umlauts,accents...) to their closest ASCII equivalent (slug creation)` would be a good compromise? — Max, Aug 05 '12 at 11:31
@user my (non-expert's) assumption had been that all the diacritics are covered by "accents". Sure, go ahead, that sounds like a good compromise — Pekka, Aug 05 '12 at 12:04
If your target repertoire is not just accented Latin characters, what sort of characters do you want to convert and what should they be converted into? If you can get the Unicode into Fully Decomposed form then stripping the accents should be trivial; but if some of your characters are not composed, that won't help. See also http://www.unicode.org/faq/normalization.html — tripleee, Aug 05 '12 at 12:36
In PHP i use iconv for this, but there is a port of this to javascript at https://github.com/ashtuchkin/iconv-lite/tree/master/test — Ekim, Aug 06 '12 at 08:51

score 32 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 31 '19 at 18:21

32

The easiest way I've found:

var str = "Rånades på Skyttis i Ö-vik";
var combining = /[\u0300-\u036F]/g; 

console.log(str.normalize('NFKD').replace(combining, ''));

For reference see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/normalize

edited Jan 31 '19 at 18:21

mraxus

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answered May 13 '14 at 14:20

Rez

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[ECMAScript 6](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/normalize). As of today, it's only supported by latest Chrome and Firefox alphas. Promising, though. – Álvaro González May 13 '14 at 14:28
I used this method in NodeJS. Maybe there is some Unicode Normalization module for clients, like [unorm](https://github.com/walling/unorm) – Rez May 14 '14 at 07:45
Node.js has iconv ports anyway. – Álvaro González May 14 '14 at 07:46
Yes, but there no need to use additional module – Rez May 14 '14 at 08:38
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How about norwegian characters like ø or æ ? – Michal Biros Apr 01 '19 at 12:16

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 22 '20 at 21:01

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I would recommend Unicode package, it will also map Greek and Cyrillic letters to their closest ascii symbol:

unidecode('Lillı Celiné Никита Ödipus');

'Lilli Celine Nikita Odipus'

answered Apr 22 '20 at 21:01

Adam

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score 3 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:47

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It's because iconv is a native compiled UNIX utility behind the most i18n character map conversion functions.

You won't find it in javascript unless you access some browser component.

Encoding is a property of the document so most javascript implementation just simply dismiss it.

You'll need a pure js library for unaccented strings. It would be the best to have one for the specific language you need.

The simpliest way is via some translate tables or even regex replaces.

like here : http://lehelk.com/2011/05/06/script-to-remove-diacritics/

check this thread too : Replacing diacritics in Javascript

edited May 23 '17 at 11:47

Community

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answered Aug 06 '12 at 19:58

kisp

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I've just realized that replacing diacritics with a single `ASCII` character isn't ideal. For instance in German, `ü` should be converted to `ue` and not just `u`, see http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/33032/how-to-handle-urls-with-diacritic-characters. It seems that even `iconv` is not doing ir (`php -r 'setLocale(LC_ALL,"de_DE"); echo iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", "ü");' // -> u)`, therefore I think I'm going to create translation tables myself (based on `iconv` and tweaked manually) and use those for both `JavaCript` and `PHP`. – Max Aug 06 '12 at 20:46
According to this [iconv user comment](http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php#105507) then iconv will convert `ü` to `ue` if the locale is set to German. – icc97 Dec 10 '13 at 13:18

Convert non-ASCII characters (umlauts, accents...) to their closest ASCII equivalent (slug creation)

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