use Unicode::Normalize; my %respell; open( INFO, "<:utf8", "cetnosti" ) or die "cetnosti: $!"; while () { next unless ( /[^[:ascii:]]/ ); # skip words that are all-ascii my ( $word, $freq ) = split; my $ascii_word = NFD( $word ); # break accented letters into letter, diacritic $ascii_word =~ s/[^[:ascii:]]+//g; # delete diacritics $respell{$ascii_word} = $word; } close INFO;