UTF8 TO ASCII

US-ASCII transliterations of Unicode text

Ported Sean M. Burke's Text::Unidecode Perl module

http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Text-Unidecode-0.04/
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/

Use is simple;

<?php
require_once '/path/to/utf8_to_ascii/utf8_to_ascii.php';
$utf8 = file_get_contents('/tmp/someutf8.txt');
$ascii = utf8_to_ascii($utf8);
?>

Some notes;

- Make sure you provide is well-formed UTF-8!
http://phputf8.sourceforge.net/#UTF_8_Validation_and_Cleaning

- For European languages, it should replace Unicode character
with corresponding ascii characters and produce a readable
result. For other languages, the results will be less
meaningful - it's a "dumb" character for character replacement
True trasliteration is a little more complex than this;
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration

- For any characters for which there's no replacement
character available, a (default) '?' will be inserted. The second
argument can be used to define an alternative replacement char

- Don't panic about all the files in the db subdirectory - they
are not all loaded at once - in fact they are only loaded if they
are needed to convert a given character (i.e. which files get
loaded depends on the input)

For a little more see;
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/03/03/us-ascii-transliterations-of-unicode-text/