Bash: Convert non-ASCII characters to ASCII

Question

How can I convert a string like Žvaigždės aukštybėj užges or äüöÖÜÄ to Zvaigzdes aukstybej uzges or auoOUA, respectively, using Bash?

Basically I just want to convert all characters which aren't in the Latin alphabet.

Thanks

Michael Krelin - hacker · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-29 15:04:08Z

72

Depending on your machine you can try piping your strings through

iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//translit

(or whatever your encoding is, if it's not utf-8)

answered Dec 29, 2009 at 15:04

Michael Krelin - hacker

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3 Comments

majorgear Over a year ago

echo "Aldo Vásquez" | iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//translit Aldo V'asquez . running this through the app I"m trying to match , it outputs "Aldo_Vasquez" how would I get iconv to do that?

Michael Krelin - hacker Over a year ago

@majorgear, honestly — no idea. This particular case can be handled by something like echo "Aldo Vásquez" | tr 'ÁáÉé' 'AaEe', but it's hardly a solution to write home about…

majorgear Over a year ago

Thanks. I was trying to replicate the output of an app I was using. Its open source so I’m just going to have to dig into the code to find how it’s doing the conversion.

Claudio d'Angelis · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-24 16:41:19Z

18

You might be able to use iconv.

For example, the string:

Žvaigždės aukštybėj užges or äüöÖÜÄ

is in file testutf8.txt, utf8 format.

Running command:

iconv -f UTF8 -t US-ASCII//TRANSLIT testutf8.txt

results in:

Zvaigzdes aukstybej uzges or auoOUA

edited Apr 24, 2017 at 16:41

Claudio d'Angelis

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answered Dec 29, 2009 at 15:10

Steve De Caux

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Comments

Emil Vikström · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-29 15:05:29Z

8

echo Hej på dig, du den dära | iconv -f utf-8 -t us-ascii//TRANSLIT

gives:

Hej pa dig, du den dara

answered Dec 29, 2009 at 15:05

Emil Vikström

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Comments

GLNB · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-30 11:57:25Z

4

You can also use the python library unidecode to perform so:

$ echo "Žvaigždės aukštybėj užges äüöÖÜÄ" | unidecode

Output:

Zvaigzdes aukstybej uzges auoOUA

See this post for other approaches.

answered Mar 30, 2021 at 11:57

GLNB

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Comments

Zombo · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-22 00:12:36Z

0

 try {
        String name = "Žvaigždės aukštybėj užges ";
        String s1 = Normalizer.normalize(name, Normalizer.Form.NFKD);
        String regex = "[\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}\\p{IsLm}\\p{IsSk}]+";

        String s2 = new String(s1.replaceAll(regex, "").getBytes("ascii"), "ascii");

    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    }

edited Jun 22, 2015 at 0:12

Zombo

1

answered Mar 2, 2012 at 3:54

user1244254

2 Comments

geotheory Over a year ago

Easy to criticise this, but a newbie took the effort, got shouted down and has now left SO. [Slow clap..] And what would we do without iconv?

pyrocrasty Over a year ago

@geotheory: ...and it's not like the other answers are pure bash, either. They all rely on an external executable. All this answer really needs is instructions to compile the java file and run it from bash.

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