Question

How to remove diacritic marks from characters using C#?

Asked by: jneyens

What's the easiest way to remove diacritic marks from characters using C#? I would like to have following function:

string RemoveDiacriticMark(string c)

Sample use:

RemoveDiacriticMark("é") -> "e"
RemoveDiacriticMark("ü") -> "u"
RemoveDiacriticMark("à") -> "a"
....

Thanks!

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Asked On
2005-02-19 at 05:05:00ID21321195
Tags

diacritic

,

remove

Topic

C# Programming Language

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Answers

 

by: muzzy2003Posted on 2005-02-19 at 09:11:51ID: 13354109

There is a C library to do this called unac, but it basically stores all the unicode accented characters and their unaccented equivalents and does the translation on that basis. You could translate this to C#. You can download it from:

http://www.nongnu.org/unac/unac-man3.en.html

I don't know of any other way of doing this.

 

by: jneyensPosted on 2005-02-19 at 09:43:43ID: 13354230

This article describes how to remove diacritic marks from characters.

http://www.ahinea.com/en/tech/accented-translate.html

It's for Perl and I need a way to do this in C# ...

 

by: muzzy2003Posted on 2005-02-19 at 10:17:08ID: 13354360

Well, you could do something like this in C#.

        public static string RemoveDiacritics(string input) {

            string Return = input;

            Return = Regex.Replace(Return, "\xe6", "ae"); // a-umlaut
            Return = Regex.Replace(Return, "\xc7", "c"); // c-cedilla
            ... same for other single matches ...

            Return = Regex.Replace(Return, "[\xe0\xe1\xe2\xe3\xe4\xe5]", "a"); // a with other accents
            ... same for other multiple matches ...

            return Return;

        }

You'll need to fill in the blanks. You can find the codes for all the characters using Character Map. I would fill them all in myself, but there are a few, and I don't actually need this function myself. ;)

 

by: muzzy2003Posted on 2005-02-19 at 10:17:25ID: 13354361

You'll need using System.Text.RegularExpressions for the last one, obviously!

 

by: muzzy2003Posted on 2005-02-19 at 10:18:16ID: 13354364

And you might choose to translate a-umlaut to a rather than ae - depends on your preference. The Perl library you referenced goes for ae, which is why I did, but it's up to you.

 

by: jneyensPosted on 2005-02-19 at 10:28:38ID: 13354427

According to http://www.nongnu.org/unac/unac-man3.en.html there should be a way to this in a more general fashion. I'm looking for an implementation that goes beyond hardcoding all possible substitutions.

I guess it has something todo with the ParseCombiningCharacters method of the StringInfo class but I cannot figure out how the missing parts :-(

 

by: muzzy2003Posted on 2005-02-19 at 10:33:51ID: 13354453

You are referring to the unac C code that I referred to in my first post. If you download the C source code, you will see that it builds up enormous arrays of hard-coded Unicode values, so I'm afraid there is no way beyond the hardcoding. The ParseCombiningCharacters method is to do with characters that, even with the enormous Unicode character space, are represented by Unicode characters - it is not related to the sort of characters you want to work with.

 

by: jneyensPosted on 2005-02-20 at 00:39:32ID: 13356620

I've submited the question to Michael Kaplan who's working at Microsoft. He answered the question on his blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/02/19/376617.aspx

Conclusion: using Whidbey it's possible to wite a RemoveDiacritics function. in prior versions your options are more limited, through a p/invoke to the FoldString API with the MAP_COMPOSITE flag.

 

by: moduloPosted on 2005-03-25 at 00:09:48ID: 13628431

PAQed with points refunded (500)

modulo
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