EDIT 2012-01-20: Oh boy! The solution was so much simpler and has been in the framework nearly forever. As pointed out by knightpfhor :
string.Compare(s1, s2, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, CompareOptions.IgnoreNonSpace);
Here’s a function that strips diacritics from a string:
static string RemoveDiacritics(string text)
{
string formD = text.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD);
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
foreach (char ch in formD)
{
UnicodeCategory uc = CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(ch);
if (uc != UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark)
{
sb.Append(ch);
}
}
return sb.ToString().Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormC);
}
More details on MichKap’s blog (RIP…).
The principle is that is it turns ‘é’ into 2 successive chars ‘e’, acute.
It then iterates through the chars and skips the diacritics.
“héllo” becomes “he<acute>llo”, which in turn becomes “hello”.
Debug.Assert("hello"==RemoveDiacritics("héllo"));
Note: Here’s a more compact .NET4+ friendly version of the same function:
static string RemoveDiacritics(string text)
{
return string.Concat(
text.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD)
.Where(ch => CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(ch)!=
UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark)
).Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormC);
}