I have a nasty looking translation statment that "de-accents" Latin 1 characters. I wrote it for indexing and searching web-pages in an accent free way. The important thing to remember is that you must de-accent both the search-term and the text being searched against. Also that this code will only work for the Latin-1 character set.

Here's my tr statment (I'm not using the code tag on purpose 'cause othewise the line will be too long. I've also inserted spaces to help the wrapping... you should remove them if you use this statment):

tr/\xC0\xC1\xC2\xC3\xC4\xC5\xC6\xC7\xC8\xC9\xCA\xCB\xCC\xCD \xCE\xCF\xD0\xD1\xD2\xD3\xD4\xD5\xD6\xD8\xD9\xDA\xDB\xDC \xDD\xDF\xE0\xE1\xE2\xE3\xE4\xE5\xE6\xE7\xE8\xE9\xEA\xEB \xEC\xED\xEE\xEF\xF1\xF2\xF3\xF4\xF5\xF6\xF8\xF9\xFA\xFB \xFC\xFD\xFF/\x41\x41\x41\x41\x41\x41\x41\x43\x45\x45\x45 \x45\x49\x49\x49\x49\x44\x4E\x4F\x4F\x4F\x4F\x4F\x4F\x55 \x55\x55\x55\x59\x73\x61\x61\x61\x61\x61\x61\x61\x63\x65 \x65\x65\x65\x69\x69\x69\x69\x6E\x6F\x6F\x6F\x6F\x6F\x6F \x75\x75\x75\x75\x79\x79/;