Convert ut8 to non utf8 in laravel

Question

I am using this to create username based on name. Name needs to be utf8 but username does not. How could I convert utf8 to non utf8?

public static function createUsername ($name, $count = 0) {
        $username = implode('.', explode(' ', strtolower($name)));

        if ($count > 0) {
            $username = $username . $count;
        }

        if (count(self::where('username', $username)->get()) > 0) {
            self::createUsername($name, $count++);
        }

        return $username;
    }

Answer 1

Laravel provides a function for converting utf-8 strings into ASCCI.

Str::ascii($string)

I'm not entirely sure why you would want to do this as the performance gain is likely not all too great. See Does using ASCII/Latin Charset speed up the database?