Is there a way to simply normalize turkish characters like Ç, Ğ, İ, Ö, Ş, Ü and ı ?
cause now I'm using str_replace but that doesn't seem the right way to go, cause it's possible to forget a character.... Is there a more standard way? I tried to use the normalize method within the PHP internationalization module, but the Turkish characters stay Turkish. I would like to replace them with normal characters for the URL. So Ç becomes C and Ş becomes S, and so on.
What do you mean by normalization? Just take the characters as they come in, but put your scripts, connection and html in correct encoding.
UTF-8 suggested, explanation: UTF-8 vs. Unicode
If you only want ASCII chars, you can test this by something like ord($char) < 255.
For conversion look into these functions:
http://php.net/mb_convert_encoding
A call similiar to
$str = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $str);
would do the trick.
Another preg_replace way: Convert special characters to normal characters using PHP, like ã, é, ç to a, e, c