Unidecode
[Text]

It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but you can't display it -- usually because you're trying to show it to a user via an application that doesn't support Unicode, or because the fonts you need aren't accessible. More...

Classes
class	ConverterUnidecode
	ASCII transliterations of unicode text. More...
class	UnidecodestringParameterizedRouteHandler
	Handle ansi unidecoded string (the "spu" type). More...

---

Detailed Description

It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but you can't display it -- usually because you're trying to show it to a user via an application that doesn't support Unicode, or because the fonts you need aren't accessible.

You could represent the Unicode characters as "???????" or "\15BA\15A0\1610...", but that's nearly useless to the user who actually wants to read what the text says.

What Unidecode provides is a function, that takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in ASCII characters (i.e., the universally displayable characters between 0x00 and 0x7F). The representation is almost always an attempt at *transliteration* -- i.e., conveying, in Roman letters, the pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing system. (See the example above)

Usage

 print ConverterFactory::encode("\x53\17\x4E\B0", CONVERTER_UNIDECODE, 'UTF-16');
 // prints: Bei Jing

Ommit encoding when dealing with strings in default encoding

 print ConverterFactory::encode('Jürgen\'s Café offers à la carte', CONVERTER_UNIDECODE);
 // prints: Jurgen's Cafe offers a la carte

Additional notes

This is a port of the Tomaz Solc's <tomaz@zemanta.com> Python port of the Text::Unidecode Perl module by Sean M. Burke <sburke@cpan.org>.

Character transliteration tables copyright 2001, Sean M. Burke <sburke@cpan.org>, all rights reserved. http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Text-Unidecode-0.04/

Python code copyright 2009, Tomaz Solc <tomaz@zemanta.com>, http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unidecode