将字符串中的非拉丁字符更改为拉丁字符

Question

I'm trying to match by regex in Ruby or in Javascript a string that contains non english characters.

So is there a way to replace the string "täglichen" with the string "taglichen" ? I know that i can replace non english characters by options like:

/(?i)t[aä]glichen/

But for this i need dictionary of possible characters and set all of them in searched word. Maybe there is a more efficient way to do this ?

Answer 1

There is a legit solution for modern ruby, using String#unicode_normalize

"täglichen".unicode_normalize(:nfd).
            codepoints.
            reject(&128.method(:<)).
            pack('U*')
#⇒ "taglichen"

To match:

"täglichen".unicode_normalize(:nfc) =~ /t[aä]glichen/i
#⇒ 0

The normalization is needed because umlaut might be either a single codepoint 228 or a combined diacritics [97, 776] . Check this (try to copy-paste into your REPL):

"ä" == "ä"
#⇒ false

Answer 2

One thing you can do is slugify your strings before matching ( https://www.npmjs.com/package/slugify )

Input: "Ich heiße Fred"
Output: "ich-heisse-fred"

If you don't like the - characters as separators you can change that, as stated by the docs