Newsgroups:  gmane.linux.debian.user
Date:        Sat, 20 Aug 2005 00:36:14 +0200

> Is there any tools that can convert European characters to plain
> 7bit-Ascii?

Or, if you'd like to specify the special characters' hex codes (in case you have problems entering them directly…), you could write instead

#!/usr/bin/perl

%mapping = (
    'e4' => 'ae',
    'f6' => 'oe',
    'fc' => 'ue',
    'df' => 'ss',
    # ...
);

$set = join '', map "\\x$_", keys %mapping;

while (<>) {
    s/([$set])/$mapping{sprintf "%x", ord $1}/ge;
    print;
}

Almut Behrens

P.S. Normally, you'd use iconv for encoding conversions. However, "iconv -f 8859_1 -t ASCII isolatin1-file" doesn't work, because ASCII can only represent a subset of characters present in 8859_1 — which makes iconv complain…

> P.S. Normally, you'd use iconv for encoding conversions.  However,
> "iconv -f 8859_1 -t ASCII isolatin1-file" doesn't work, because ASCII
> can only represent a subset of characters present in 8859_1 -- which
> makes iconv complain...

ay:~> latin1 | recode -f latin1..ascii
20  !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
40 @ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
60 `abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
A0  !clbSS"(c)a<<not-(R)^2^3'uP.,^1o>>1/41/23/4?
C0 `A"AAAEC`E`ID~N`O"OxO`U
E0 `a"aaaec`e`id~n`o"o:o`u

ay:~> latin1 | recode -f latin1..text
20  !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
40 @ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
60 `abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
A0  ``''
C0 A`A^A"C,E`E'E^E"I^I"O`O^O"U`U^U"
E0 a`a^a"c,e`e'e^e"i^i"o`o^o"u`u^u"