Remove Diacritics

If you ever faced the terror of finding a diacritic that messed up some of your regex, or some awesome script you’ve written, then we are on the same boat. Although I love my language, portuguese, messing up with scripts is never a good way to make friends, so I often need to remove those annoying characters from sentences and every time I need to do so I go surf the web for the same answer. Well, here is my list of ways to remove diacritics in every language I needed.

Please, keep in mind that I’ve only needed a way to remove characters used in portuguese, so all of this tools work for portuguese and were not tested for any other language.

Powershell

When automating the creation of folders in powershell, I really needed some kind of tool to remove diacritics. This is where I got this tip from.

function Remove-Diacritics {
    PARAM ([string]$String)

    $bytes = [Text.Encoding]::GetEncoding("Cyrillic").GetBytes($String)
    [Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($bytes)
}

C#

This solution was very simple, it only needed some tunning of the powershell solution.

function Remove-Diacritics
{
    PARAM ([string]$String)
    [Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString([Text.Encoding]::GetEncoding("Cyrillic").GetBytes($String))
}