phpreplacediacriticsmultibytestrtr

How to use strtr() to translate multibyte/accented/diacritic characters?


Does anyone have a multibyte variant of the strtr() function?

Example of desired usage:

Example:
$from = 'ľľščťžýáíŕďňäô'; // these chars are in UTF-8
$to   = 'llsctzyairdnao';

// input - in UTF-8
$str  = 'Kŕdeľ ďatľov učí koňa žrať kôru.';
$str  = mb_strtr( $str, $from, $to );

// output - str without diacritic
// $str = 'Krdel datlov uci kona zrat koru.';

Solution

  • I believe strtr is multi-byte safe, either way since str_replace is multi-byte safe you could wrap it:

    function mb_strtr($str, $from, $to)
    {
      return str_replace(mb_str_split($from), mb_str_split($to), $str);
    }
    

    Since there is no mb_str_split function you also need to write your own (using mb_substr and mb_strlen), or you could just use the PHP UTF-8 implementation (changed slightly):

    function mb_str_split($str) {
        return preg_split('~~u', $str, null, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);;
    
    }
    

    However if you're looking for a function to remove all (latin?) accentuations from a string you might find the following function useful:

    function Unaccent($string)
    {
        return preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(?:acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml|caron);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
    }
    
    echo Unaccent('ľľščťžýáíŕďňä'); // llsctzyairdna
    echo Unaccent('Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn'); // Internationalizaetion