Search code examples
phparabicdiacritics

Remove Arabic Diacritic


I want php to convert this...

Text : الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ
converted to : الحمد لله رب العالمين 

I am not sure where to start and how to do it. Absolutely no idea. I have done some research, found this link http://www.suhailkaleem.com/2009/08/26/remove-diacritics-from-arabic-text-quran/ but it is not using php. I would like to use php and covert the above text to converted text. I want to remove any diacritic from user input arabic text


Solution

  • The vowel diacritics in Arabic are combining characters, meaning that a simple search for these should suffice. There's no need to have a replace rule for every possible consonant with every possible vowel, which is a little tedious.

    Here's a working example that outputs what you need:

    header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8', true);
    $string = 'الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ';
    
    $remove = array('ِ', 'ُ', 'ٓ', 'ٰ', 'ْ', 'ٌ', 'ٍ', 'ً', 'ّ', 'َ');
    $string = str_replace($remove, '', $string);
    
    echo $string; // outputs الحمد لله رب العالمين
    

    What's important here is the $remove array. It looks weird because there's a combining character between the ' quotes, so it modifies one of those single quotes. This might need saving in the same character encoding as your text is.