Transliterate accented letters in C

Question

Is it possible to transliterate accents only using iconv?

iconv_t iconv = iconv_open("ASCII//TRANSLIT", "utf-8");

For example I want to transliterate (Spanish) á, é, í, ó to a, e, i, o, but I need to keep ñ. Maybe is there a way to set skipped letters in iconv?

I know that I can use simple replacement, but first I want to know if there are any better solutions.

Answer 1

You cannot achieve the behaviour you've described in your question by simply utilizing the iconv tool since it doesn't provide an option for skipping a specific character. What you could do is create a lookup table (considering your input will be only in UTF8 Latin1).

The following piece of code could do the trick:

 char* stripAccents(char* text) {
    char *p = text;
    unsigned char c = 0; 
    const char* trans = "AAAAAAECEEEEIIIIDÑOOOOOx0UUUUYPsaaaaaaeceeeeiiiiOñooooo/0uuuuypy";
    while ( *(p) != '\0' ) 
    {
        c = *(p);
        if ( c >= 192 ) {
            *(p) = trans [ c - 192 ];
        }
        ++p; 
    }
    return text;
  }