Replacing special character 'É' to 'E'

Hi,

Is there a Matlab function to replace the special characters (like 'É') to the regular UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1?

Thanks,

[Stephen23]

"regular UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1"

Both UTF-8 (encodes all Unicode characters) and ISO-8859-1 include "É"... Perhaps you meant to ask something like "how to remove diacritics from characters?", which would match your question title.

Answer 1

[Jonas]

looks like there are only manual solutions.

Stackoverflow is your friend ;-)

https://stackoverflow.com/a/60181033

[Stephen23]

"Stackoverflow is your friend"

Stackoverflow: Caecus caeco dux

[Jonas]

non cogito ergo sum

[Pete sherer]

Thanks very much guys. I used the function in the stack overflow.

[Jonas]

for competeness, i repeat the code of the given site here:

written by Jim Goodall

please also note, that the list does not have to be complete, see e.g. this list of Wikipedia

function [clean_s] = removediacritics(s)
%REMOVEDIACRITICS Removes diacritics from text.
%   This function removes many common diacritics from strings, such as
%     á - the acute accent
%     à - the grave accent
%     â - the circumflex accent
%     ü - the diaeresis, or trema, or umlaut
%     ñ - the tilde
%     ç - the cedilla
%     å - the ring, or bolle
%     ø - the slash, or solidus, or virgule

% uppercase
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Á|À|Â|Ã|Ä|Å)','A');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Æ)','AE');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:ß)','ss');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Ç)','C');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Ð)','D');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:É|È|Ê|Ë)','E');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Í|Ì|Î|Ï)','I');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Ñ)','N');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Ó|Ò|Ô|Ö|Õ|Ø)','O');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Œ)','OE');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Ú|Ù|Û|Ü)','U');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:Ý|Ÿ)','Y');

% lowercase
s = regexprep(s,'(?:á|à|â|ä|ã|å)','a');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:æ)','ae');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:ç)','c');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:ð)','d');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:é|è|ê|ë)','e');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:í|ì|î|ï)','i');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:ñ)','n');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:ó|ò|ô|ö|õ|ø)','o');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:œ)','oe');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:ú|ù|ü|û)','u');
s = regexprep(s,'(?:ý|ÿ)','y');

% return cleaned string
clean_s = s;
end

[Jonas]

also it is qeustionable to do this whole thing since the change of letters can change th emeaning of the words, also in German for example, ä, ö and ü are changed to ae, oe and ue, but the same procedure does not make sence in other languages like turkish

Answer 2

[Stephen23]

"Is there a Matlab function to replace the special characters (like 'É')"

You can call Python from MATLAB, and it can do the heavy-lifting:

inp = 'É';
baz = @(v)char(v(1)); % only need the first decomposed character.
out = baz(py.unicodedata.normalize('NFKD',inp)) % to remove diacritics.

out = 'E'

Read more:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/unicodedata.html

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16467479/normalizing-unicode

Answer 3

[John D'Errico]

Easy peasy.

str = 'ABCDEFGHIJKÉÉÀÀÄÄabcdefghijkl'

str = 'ABCDEFGHIJKÉÉÀÀÄÄabcdefghijkl'

strrep(str,'É','E')

ans = 'ABCDEFGHIJKEEÀÀÄÄabcdefghijkl'

If there are other special characters you want replaced, strrep will handle them too, but it looks like you would need to do them one at a time with strrep. But other tools would certainly work too. Certainly regexp, but I've never been very good at regular expressions. :) This will work though:

badchar = 'ÉÀÄ';
goodchar = 'EAA';
[u,v] = ismember(str,'ÉÀÄ');
str(u) = goodchar(v(u))

str = 'ABCDEFGHIJKEEAAAAabcdefghijkl'