OOO, the words "Can of worms" springs to mind here.

Before anyone rushes off and writes a one liner (possibly with a reg exp, better ask Meow if that's OK :), there's one major question?

"Are you working with text from only one character set?"

Please feel free to correct me if I get this wrong but AFAIK, extended characters (ie those outside the 1-127 range) vary depending on the character set used. And, with the growth of unicode, this gets even more confusing...

If you have sample text you can copy/paste from, you could just run it through a few regular expressions to clean up. As for modules, no idea, sorry :(

my $string = "le café, a là carte, table d'hôte";
$string =~ s/[èéêë]/e/gs;
$string =~ s/[àáâãäå]/e/gs;
# etc etc
[download]

Apologies to those whose browsers are using different character encoding in their browsers and aren't seeing eeee and aaaaaa with accents in the reg exps :)