About the Remove Accents From Text
Some destinations still accept ASCII only: a bank transfer reference field, an FTP filename, an older customer database, a username. This tool rewrites accented Latin letters as their base forms, so é becomes e, ü becomes u, ñ becomes n and Å becomes A.
The method is Unicode normalisation rather than a lookup table. The text is decomposed to NFD form, which splits each precomposed letter into a base character plus a separate combining mark, and every combining diacritic in the U+0300 to U+036F block is then discarded. One rule covers the whole Latin range, instead of a hand-written character list that always misses something.
Letters that are not a base plus an accent need explicit mapping, and three common ones are handled in both cases: ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, ø becomes o. Others do not decompose and pass through unchanged, so Polish ł, Icelandic þ and ð, and the Turkish dotless ı stay as they are and need a manual sweep. Non-Latin scripts are left alone by design.
Case is preserved, so the output is a faithful ASCII version of the text rather than a slug. For a URL you also want lowercasing and hyphenation, which Slug Generator handles in one step; to drop the punctuation as well, Remove Special Characters.
How to use
- Paste the text.
- Copy the ASCII result.
- Use the Slug Generator instead if you want a URL slug.
Common questions
- What happens to ß, æ and ø?
- They are mapped to ss, ae and o respectively, since they have no single ASCII base letter.
- Does it lowercase the text?
- No. Case is preserved. Use Lowercase Text or the Slug Generator if you need lowercase.
- Will Chinese or Arabic text be converted?
- No. Only Latin letters with diacritics are simplified; scripts without an ASCII base are left as they are.