What is Remove Accents?
Remove Accents strips all diacritical marks (accents) from text, converting accented characters to their base ASCII equivalents. This is essential for creating URL-friendly slugs, improving search functionality, and ensuring compatibility with systems that don't support special characters.
Examples:
Café → Cafe
Résumé → Resume
Naïve → Naive
Zürich → Zurich
Señor → Senor
When to Use Remove Accents
- URL Slugs: Create SEO-friendly URLs without special characters
- Search Functionality: Improve search matching (café matches cafe)
- Database Keys: Normalize text for database indexing
- File Names: Create compatible file names across systems
- Email Addresses: Ensure compatibility with email systems
- API Parameters: Clean input for API calls
Real-World Examples
Blog Post URL:
Title: "Café Culture in São Paulo"
Slug: "cafe-culture-in-sao-paulo"
Original: "café-culture-in-são-paulo"
Cleaned: "cafe-culture-in-sao-paulo"Search Optimization:
User searches: "resume"
Matches documents with:
- "resume" ✓
- "résumé" ✓ (after normalization)
- "Resume" ✓File Naming:
Document: "Présentation Français.pdf"
Filename: "Presentation Francais.pdf"
Compatible across all systemsCommon Accent Characters
French:
é, è, ê, ë → e
à, â → a
ç → c
German:
ä, ö, ü → a, o, u
ß → ss
Spanish:
á, é, í, ó, ú → a, e, i, o, u
ñ → n
Portuguese:
ã, õ → a, o
ç → c
Best Practices
- ✓ Essential for URL-friendly slugs
- ✓ Improves search functionality
- ✓ Ensures cross-platform compatibility
- ✓ Good for database normalization
- ✗ Don't use for display text (keep original accents)
- ✗ May change meaning in some languages
- ✗ Store original text separately when possible
- ⚠️ Always preserve original for user-facing content