How do I remove diacritics (accents) from a string in .NET?

by

I’ve not used this method, but Michael Kaplan describes a method for doing so in his blog post (with a confusing title) that talks about stripping diacritics: Stripping is an interesting job (aka
On the meaning of meaningless, aka All
Mn characters are non-spacing, but
some are more non-spacing than
others)

static string RemoveDiacritics(string text) 
{
    var normalizedString = text.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD);
    var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder(capacity: normalizedString.Length);

    for (int i = 0; i < normalizedString.Length; i++)
    {
        char c = normalizedString[i];
        var unicodeCategory = CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(c);
        if (unicodeCategory != UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark)
        {
            stringBuilder.Append(c);
        }
    }

    return stringBuilder
        .ToString()
        .Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormC);
}

Note that this is a followup to his earlier post: Stripping diacritics….

The approach uses String.Normalize to split the input string into constituent glyphs (basically separating the “base” characters from the diacritics) and then scans the result and retains only the base characters. It’s just a little complicated, but really you’re looking at a complicated problem.

Of course, if you’re limiting yourself to French, you could probably get away with the simple table-based approach in How to remove accents and tilde in a C++ std::string, as recommended by @David Dibben.

More Related Contents:

  1. Converting String^ to Int
  2. What is the maximum possible length of a .NET string?
  3. What is the difference between String.Empty and “” (empty string)?
  4. String.Join vs. StringBuilder: which is faster?
  5. How are strings passed in .NET?
  6. .NET Format a string with fixed spaces
  7. Why isn’t String.Empty a constant?
  8. .NET – How can you split a “caps” delimited string into an array?
  9. How do you get a string from a MemoryStream?
  10. C++ .NET convert System::String to std::string
  11. Is string a value type or a reference type?
  12. Regex.IsMatch vs string.Contains
  13. What is the best way to convert between char* and System::String in C++/CLI
  14. How can I check if a string is null or empty in PowerShell?
  15. How can I use enum in C# for storing string constants? [duplicate]
  16. How to change diacritic characters to non-diacritic ones [duplicate]
  17. String manipulation with & or + in VB.NET
  18. Is there an equivalent to ‘sscanf()’ in .NET?
  19. .NET String.Format() to add commas in thousands place for a number
  20. Handling Dialogs in WPF with MVVM
  21. Convert a list to a string in C#
  22. What is the difference between .NET Core and .NET Standard Class Library project types?
  23. Why is the first WCF client call slow?
  24. .NET DateTime.Now returns incorrect time when time zone is changed
  25. How to make a .NET application “large address aware”?
  26. Should I make a DateRange object?
  27. WCF error: The caller was not authenticated by the service
  28. What is the best way to read GetResponseStream()?
  29. App.config connection string relative path
  30. Why doesn’t doubleclick event fire after mouseDown event on same element fires?

Leave a Comment