Accent Remover

In short Removing accents converts characters carrying diacritics to their plain ASCII equivalents: é becomes e, ñ becomes n, ü becomes u, so "Café München" becomes "Cafe Munchen". The conversion works by decomposing each character into a base letter plus its combining marks and then discarding the marks, which is why it handles characters it has never specifically been told about. The reason to do it is almost always a system that cannot cope: URL slugs, file names, legacy databases, and matching a search query against a name that may or may not have been typed with its accents. That last case is the most common — someone searching for "Muller" should find "Müller", and the way to make that work is to fold both sides. What this is not is a substitute for handling the text properly. The marks are part of the spelling, and removing them from display text is a small act of vandalism on someone's name. Fold a copy for matching, keep the original for showing. A few languages resist the simple rule: German ß is not a decomposable character, and Danish ø and Polish ł are separate letters rather than accented ones.