What are diacritics?
Diacritical marks (or diacritics) are signs added to letters to change their pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. Common examples include accents (é, è, ê), umlauts (ü, ö), cedillas (ç), and tildes (ñ).
Examples of diacritics conversion
Original text with diacritics
Café au lait - French coffee with milk
Résumé - Summary of qualifications
Naïve - Showing unaffected simplicity
Piñata - Decorated container filled with treats
Jalapeño - Type of chili pepper
Crème brûlée - French dessert with caramelized sugar
Déjà vu - Feeling of having experienced something before
Voilà - Expression meaning "there it is"
Façade - Front of a building
Zoë - A name with a diaeresisConverted to ASCII
Cafe au lait - French coffee with milk
Resume - Summary of qualifications
Naive - Showing unaffected simplicity
Pinata - Decorated container filled with treats
Jalapeno - Type of chili pepper
Creme brulee - French dessert with caramelized sugar
Deja vu - Feeling of having experienced something before
Voila - Expression meaning "there it is"
Facade - Front of a building
Zoe - A name with a diaeresisCommon diacritical marks and their ASCII equivalents
| Character with diacritic | ASCII equivalent | Name |
|---|---|---|
| á, à, â, ä | a | Accented a |
| é, è, ê, ë | e | Accented e |
| í, ì, î, ï | i | Accented i |
| ó, ò, ô, ö | o | Accented o |
| ú, ù, û, ü | u | Accented u |
| ç | c | C with cedilla |
| ñ | n | N with tilde |
| ß | ss | German eszett |
When to convert diacritics to ASCII
- When working with systems that only support ASCII characters
- When creating URLs or filenames that need to be compatible across different platforms
- When preparing text for search engines that might not handle diacritics well
- When normalizing text for comparison or sorting
- When creating identifiers or keys that need to be simple and consistent
Note:
Converting diacritics to ASCII can make text more compatible with various systems, but it may also remove linguistic nuances and can change the pronunciation or meaning of words in some languages. Use this conversion when technical compatibility is more important than preserving the exact orthography.
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