Script for replacing french accented characters with English character equivalents during the generation of SEO urls
Usually we build SEO friendly urls by replacing the French characters with their English equivalent. I had tried several ways to do this, but failed. So just created a simple small function for this.
The function simply does the following:
First it generates 2 arrays, One array will hold the required urlencoded equivalents of the french accented charactes and second array will hold the English characters.
Next step is to generate a url encoded string ofcharacters from the french string
Next, the function will replace the urlencoded equivalents in the string with corresponding English character.
Function is given below
function replaceFrenchAccents($frenchStr){
$urlencoded_str= urlencode( $frenchStr );
//french character array. You can add more values to this
// You should add values like 'FrenchCharacter' => 'EnglishEquivalent'
$frenchChars = array(
'Š'=>'S', 'š'=>'s', 'Ð'=>'Dj','Ž'=>'Z', 'ž'=>'z', 'À'=>'A', 'Á'=>'A', 'Â'=>'A', 'Ã'=>'A', 'Ä'=>'A',
'Å'=>'A', 'Æ'=>'A', 'Ç'=>'C', 'È'=>'E', 'É'=>'E', 'Ê'=>'E', 'Ë'=>'E', 'Ì'=>'I', 'Í'=>'I', 'Î'=>'I',
'Ï'=>'I', 'Ñ'=>'N', 'Ò'=>'O', 'Ó'=>'O', 'Ô'=>'O', 'Õ'=>'O', 'Ö'=>'O', 'Ø'=>'O', 'Ù'=>'U', 'Ú'=>'U',
'Û'=>'U', 'Ü'=>'U', 'Ý'=>'Y', 'Þ'=>'B', 'ß'=>'Ss','à'=>'a', 'á'=>'a', 'â'=>'a', 'ã'=>'a', 'ä'=>'a',
'å'=>'a', 'æ'=>'a', 'ç'=>'c', 'è'=>'e', 'é'=>'e', 'ê'=>'e', 'ë'=>'e', 'ì'=>'i', 'í'=>'i', 'î'=>'i',
'ï'=>'i', 'ð'=>'o', 'ñ'=>'n', 'ò'=>'o', 'ó'=>'o', 'ô'=>'o', 'õ'=>'o', 'ö'=>'o', 'ø'=>'o', 'ù'=>'u',
'ú'=>'u', 'û'=>'u', 'ý'=>'y', 'ý'=>'y', 'þ'=>'b', 'ÿ'=>'y', 'ƒ'=>'f'
);
//initialising find and replace array
$arrfind_enc=array();
$arrrep_str=array();
//iterating through french character aray and filling the find replace array
foreach( $frenchChars as $key=>$val ){
$arrfind_enc[]=urlencode(trim($key));
$arrrep_str[]= $val;
}
$arrfind_enc[count($arrfind_enc)]="+";
$arrrep_str[count($arrrep_str)]="-";
return( str_replace( $arrfind_enc , $arrrep_str , $urlencoded_str ) );
}
$fr_str="dispose son partenaire non marié pendant la durée des afin de rester à ses côtés aux États-Unis";
//calling function
echo( replaceFrenchAccents( $fr_str ) );
//output : the above function will replace french characters and output the following text
// dispose-son-partenaire-non-marie-pendant-la-duree-des-afin-de-rester-a-ses-cotes-aux-Etats-Unis
Hope this helped some one. Try it and post your comments.
You may also try Php's strstr()
strtr - check http://us3.php.net/strtr for more info