Easy way to remove accents from a Unicode string?

Question

I want to change this sentence :

Et ça sera sa moitié.

To :

Et ca sera sa moitie.

Is there an easy way to do this in Java, like I would do in Objective-C ?

NSString *str = @"Et ça sera sa moitié.";
NSData *data = [str dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES];
NSString *newStr = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];

Answer 1

Finally, I've solved it by using the Normalizer class.

import java.text.Normalizer;

public static String stripAccents(String s) 
{
    s = Normalizer.normalize(s, Normalizer.Form.NFD);
    s = s.replaceAll("[\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}]", "");
    return s;
}

Answer 2

Maybe the easiest and safest way is using StringUtils from Apache Commons Lang

StringUtils.stripAccents(String input)

Removes diacritics (~= accents) from a string. The case will not be altered. For instance, 'à' will be replaced by 'a'. Note that ligatures will be left as is.

StringUtils.stripAccents()

Answer 3

I guess the only difference is that I use a + and not a [] compared to the solution. I think both works, but it's better to have it here as well.

String normalized = Normalizer.normalize(input, Normalizer.Form.NFD);
String accentRemoved = normalized.replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "");

Answer 4

For kotlin

fun stripAccents(s: String): String 
{
    var string = Normalizer.normalize(s, Normalizer.Form.NFD)
    string = Regex("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+").replace(string, "")
    return  string
}

Answer 5

Assuming you are using Java 6 or newer, you might want to take a look at Normalizer, which can decompose accents, then use a regex to strip the combining accents.

Otherwise, you should be able to achieve the same result using ICU4J.