How to handle diacritics (accents) when rewriting ‘pretty URLs’

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Ultimately, you’re going to have to give up on the idea of “correct”, for this problem. Translating the string, no matter how you do it, destroys accuracy in the name of compatibility and readability. All three options are equally compatible, but #1 and #2 suffer in terms of readability. So just run with it and go for whatever looks best — option #3.

Yes, the translations are wrong for German, but unless you start requiring your users to specify what language their titles are in (and restricting them to only one), you’re not going to solve that problem without far more effort than it’s worth. (For example, running each word in the title through dictionaries for each known language and translating that word’s diacritics according to the rules of its language would work, but it’s excessive.)

Alternatively, if German is a higher concern than other languages, make your translation always use the German version when one exists: ä→ae, ë→e, ï→i, ö→oe, ü→ue.

Edit:

Oh, and as for the actual method, I’d translate the special cases, if any, via str_replace, then use iconv for the rest:

$text = str_replace(array("ä", "ö", "ü", "ß"), array("ae", "oe", "ue", "ss"), $text);
$text = iconv('UTF-8', 'US-ASCII//TRANSLIT', $text);

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