Text.AccentFold Class

Provides a basic accent folding implementation that converts common accented letters (like "á") to their non-accented forms (like "a").

This implementation is not comprehensive, and should only be used as a last resort when accent folding can't be done on the server. A comprehensive accent folding implementation would require much more character data to be sent to the browser, resulting in a significant performance penalty. This implementation strives for a compromise between usefulness and performance.

Accent folding is a destructive operation that can't be reversed, and may change or destroy the actual meaning of the text depending on the language. It should not be used on strings that will later be displayed to a user, unless this is done with the understanding that linguistic meaning may be lost and that you may in fact confuse or insult the user by doing so.

When used for matching, accent folding is likely to produce erroneous matches for languages in which characters with diacritics are considered different from their base characters, or where correct folding would map to other character sequences than just stripped characters. For example, in German "ü" is a character that's clearly different from "u" and should match "ue" instead. The word "betrügen" means "to defraud", while "betrugen" is the past tense of "to behave". The name "Müller" is expected to match "Mueller", but not "Muller". On the other hand, accent folding falls short for languages where different base characters are expected to match. In Japanese, for example, hiragana and katakana characters with the same pronunciation ("あ" and "ア") are commonly treated as equivalent for lookups, but accent folding treats them as different.