I\'d like to share some code to convert latin diacritics to their
traditional 7bit representation, like, for example,
- à,ç,é,î,... to a,c,e,i,...
- ß to ss
- ä,Ä,... to ae,Ae,...
- ë,... to e,...
(mb_convert \"7bit\" would simply delete any offending characters).
I might have missed on your country\'s typographic
conventions--correct me then.
<?php
/**
* @args string $text line of encoded text
* string $from_enc (encoding type of $text, e.g. UTF-8, ISO-8859-1)
*
* @returns 7bit representation
*/
function to7bit($text,$from_enc) {
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text,\'HTML-ENTITIES\',$from_enc);
$text = preg_replace(
array(\'/ß/\',\'/&(..)lig;/\',
\'/&([aouAOU])uml;/\',\'/&(.)[^;]*;/\'),
array(\'ss\',\"$1\",\"$1\".\'e\',\"$1\"),
$text);
return $text;
}
?>
Enjoy :-)
Johannes
==
[EDIT BY danbrown AT php DOT net: Author provided the following update on 27-FEB-2012.]
==
An addendum to my "to7bit" function referenced below in the notes.
The function is supposed to solve the problem that some languages require a different 7bit rendering of special (umlauted) characters for sorting or other applications. For example, the German ß ligature is usually written "ss" in 7bit context. Dutch ÿ is typically rendered "ij" (not "y").
The original function works well with word (alphabet) character entities and I've seen it used in many places. But non-word entities cause funny results:
E.g., "©" is rendered as "c", "­" as "s" and "&rquo;" as "r".
The following version fixes this by converting non-alphanumeric characters (also chains thereof) to '_'.
<?php
/**
* @args string $text line of encoded text
* string $from_enc (encoding type of $text, e.g. UTF-8, ISO-8859-1)
*
* @returns 7bit representation
*/
function to7bit($text,$from_enc) {
$text = preg_replace(/W+/,'_',$text);
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text,'HTML-ENTITIES',$from_enc);
$text = preg_replace(
array('/ß/','/&(..)lig;/',
'/&([aouAOU])uml;/','/ÿ/','/&(.)[^;]*;/'),
array('ss',"$1","$1".'e','ij',"$1"),
$text);
return $text;
}
?>
Enjoy again,
Johannes
