LinuxQuestions.org - How to remove accent characters

Accented characters are not easy to manage since they are encoded in UTF-8 and they are 2-bytes in size: using octal or hexadecimal codes to match them may become a mess. On the other hand, if you can type them in the command line, you can always translate them literally, e.g.

Code:

echo Renée | sed 's/é/e/'

but if you want to do this for every accented character, umlaut, caron, etc. etc. in text files, you need to write down a sequence of long character lists, e.g.

Code:

sed -e 's/[èéêë]/e/' -e 's/[àáâãäå]/a/' ...

A more convenient way is by means of the iconv command to change the character encoding from UTF-8 to ASCII and transliterate the special characters so that é become e, ò becomes o and so on. Example:

Code:

echo Renée | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII//TRANSLIT

or if you want to change the content of a file:

Code:

iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII//TRANSLIT infile > oufile

Hope this helps.