How to replace UTF-8 characters with similar-looking ASCII characters with PHP?

Question

I have a problem about Unicode. I need a function in PHP to convert the string:

Xin chào tất cả các bạn. Mình không biết tiếng anh.

To:

Xin chao tat ca cac ban. Minh khong biet tieng anh.

Can anybody help me?

Wildawildcat

Related – Accursed

The title doesn't match with the question, the text encoding is the same in the 2 strings (Stack Overflow uses UTF-8). Your question is more about transforming the text by removing the non-ASCII characters. – Slambang

Answer 1

Use iconv with the //TRANSLIT modifier:

$str1 = "Xin chào tất cả các bạn. Mình không biết tiếng anh.";
$str2 = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $str1);
print($str1.PHP_EOL.$str2);

The output will be:

Xin chào tất cả các bạn. Mình không biết tiếng anh.
Xin chao tat ca cac ban. Minh khong biet tieng anh.

DEMO

Cheyney

Thanks. But Code not support all version PHP5 and error on XAMP with version PHP5.5 "Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string in". Please help and check on phpversion higher. Demo: link – Wildawildcat

That error has nothing to do with the PHP version. It has been caused by the locale of the server. Use setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_GB.UTF-8"); to get rid of your problem. DEMO – Cheyney

Thanks very much! Code error with PHP5.5.9 :( link – Wildawildcat