Module Ubase

Conversion from UTF8 latin letters to their base character.

Use this library to remove diacritics (accents, etc.) from Latin letters in UTF8 string.

It should work for all utf8 strings, regardless of normalization NFC, NFD, NFKD, NFKC.

PLEASE don't use this library to store your strings without accents! On the contrary, store them in full UTF8 encoding, and use this library to simplify searching and comparison.

Source on github

Example

let nfc = "V\197\169 Ng\225\187\141c Phan";;
let nfd = "Vu\204\131 Ngo\204\163c Phan";;

print_endline nfc;;
Vũ Ngọc Phan

print_endline nfd;;
Vũ Ngọc Phan

from_utf8 nfc;;
 - : string = "Vu Ngoc Phan"

from_utf8 nfd;;
- : string = "Vu Ngoc Phan"

Removing accents

val from_utf8 : ?malformed:string -> ?strip:string -> string -> string

Remove all diacritics on Latin letters from a standard string containing UTF8 text. Any malformed UTF8 will be replaced by the malformed parameter (by default "?"). If the optional parameter strip is present, all non-ASCII, non-Latin unicode characters will be replaced by the strip string (which can be empty). If both malformed and strip contain only ASCII characters, then the result of from_utf8 is guaranteed to contain only ASCII characters.

val from_utf8_string : ?malformed:string -> ?strip:string -> string -> string

Deprecated. Same as from_utf8.

val uchar_replacement : Stdlib.Uchar.t -> string option

uchar_replacement u returns the replacement string for u, representing its base letter without accent or diacritics, but only if u admits such a replacement.

A number of other conversions are performed, which are not about finding the base letter, but an ascii equivalent of some non-ascii utf8 characters: for instance, single quotation marks/apostrophes (U+2018, U+2019) and double quotation marks (U+201c, U+201d).

The returned string is guaranteed to be represented by a char that is different from u.

val uchar_to_char : ?unknown:char -> Stdlib.Uchar.t -> char

Convert a Uchar to a single char representing its base letter, without diacritics. For this, some simplifications have to be made. Unusual letters will be replaced by unknown (which defaults to '?').

Utilities

val isolatin_to_utf8 : ?control:int -> string -> string

Convert an ISO_8859_1 string to a UTF8 string. ISO_8859_1 chars in the range ''0x80..0x9F' are supposed to encode 'controls', and will be rendered by the UTF8 symbol whose integer code is given by the control parameter (defaults to 0x0080)

val cp1252_to_utf8 : ?undefined:int -> string -> string

Convert a cp1252 string (also known as "windows-1252") to a UTF8 string. The 5 unassigned codes will be rendered by the UTF8 symbol whose integer code is given by the undefined parameter (defaults to 0xFFFD).

val is_space : Stdlib.Uchar.t -> bool

Return true if the character is considered as a white space (this includes tab and newline).