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in reply to Re^2: Removing Foreign Characters
in thread Removing Foreign Characters

Here's a little script I cooked up not long ago to "deaccent" letters -- you need Perl version 5.8.0 or later to run it, and it assumes that your input text (from STDIN or file(s) named on the command line) is in utf-8:
#!/usr/bin/perl -CDS use strict; require 5.008; my @charnames = grep /\tLATIN \S+ LETTER/, split( /^/, do 'unicore/Nam +e.pl' ); my %accents; for my $c ( split //, qq/AEIOUCNYaeioucny/ ) { my $case = ( $c eq lc $c ) ? 'SMALL' : 'CAPITAL'; $accents{$c} = join( '', map { chr hex( substr $_, 0, 4 ) } grep /\tLATIN $case LETTER \U$c WITH/, @charnames ); } # now use each element of %accents as a character class: while (<>) { for my $c ( keys %accents ) { s/[$accents{$c}]/$c/g; } print; }
If your original text is not utf8, well, you have to know what the encoding really is; then you can either find a way to convert to utf8 (e.g. there's an "iconv" tool on many systems, or you can use the Encode module in perl, which isn't that tough, really), OR you can hard-code all those conversions by hand instead of using the script shown above.

Based on one of your replies, you would be happy with converting the accented characters to symbolic entity references (&aacute; and so on). I think your hard-coded hash is as good a solution as any for that, so long as the encoding you used to write the the perl code matches the encoding of your text data.