Voting

The Note You're Voting On

8 years ago
I just found out today that the Windows and *NIX versions of PHP use different iconv libraries and are not very consistent with each other.

Here is a repost of my earlier code that now works on more systems. It converts as much as possible and replaces the rest with question marks:

<?php
if (!function_exists('utf8_to_ascii')) {
  setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'en_AU.utf8');
  if (@iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT", 'é') === false) {
    // PHP is probably using the glibc library (*NIX)
    function utf8_to_ascii($text) {
      return iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $text);
    }
  }
  else {
    // PHP is probably using the libiconv library (Windows)
    function utf8_to_ascii($text) {
      if (is_string($text)) {
        // Includes combinations of characters that present as a single glyph
        $text = preg_replace_callback('/\X/u', __FUNCTION__, $text);
      }
      elseif (is_array($text) && count($text) == 1 && is_string($text[0])) {
        // IGNORE characters that can't be TRANSLITerated to ASCII
        $text = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT", $text[0]);
        // The documentation says that iconv() returns false on failure but it returns ''
        if ($text === '' || !is_string($text)) {
          $text = '?';
        }
        elseif (preg_match('/\w/', $text)) {        // If the text contains any letters...
          $text = preg_replace('/\W+/', '', $text); // ...then remove all non-letters
        }
      }
      else {  // $text was not a string
        $text = '';
      }
      return $text;
    }
  }
}
<< Back to user notes page