Try this clip, if your code is in Unicode-land:
# Function: translate_diacriticals()
#
# Remove diacritical marks (e.g. ümlauts, hebrew vowels, etc)
# for use in fuzzy matches, or for avoiding excess information loss
# when encoding to restricted character sets like ASCII.
#
# See also:
# http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=835238
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence
# http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/
# http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3454.html
#
sub translate_diacriticals($)
{
my $str = Unicode::Normalize::NFKD($_[0]);
$str =~ s/\p{NonspacingMark}//g;
return $str;
}