accents : Java Glossary

accents

English, French, German, Italian and Swedish use modified letters such as é (e acute), ê (e circumflex), è (e grave), ç (c cedille). These appear in the range 0x000c to 0x00ff in the Latin-1 supplement part of Unicode.

Eastern European languages have additional accents such as š (s caron) in the range 0x0100 to 0x017f in the Latin Extended-A section of Unicode.

Esperanto has 6 accented letters ĉ (c circumflex), ĝ (g circumflex), ĥ (h circumflex), ĵ (j circumflex), ŝ (s circumflex), û (u circumflex).

Detecting Accented Vowels

com.mindprod.common11.StringTools. isVowel will tell you if a given character is a vowel, including accented vowels. You can download the source as part of the COMMON11 distributable. This works in JDK (Java Development Kit) 1.+.

Removing Accents

Here is how you can convert accented chars to unaccented ones, in Java version 1.6 or later.

Complications

In English y is sometimes a vowel, though not usually at the beginning of a word.
You can’t remove accents without knowing the language, and in some languages, it is forbidden outright. There is also no algorithmic way to know whether a letter is a vowel or not. In various languages, J, R, L, M, and N can be vowels — maybe others.
In German, ä ö ü ß are not characters with accent, but letters on their own. For the spanish Ñ this is true, too.
Would you write an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) , a FAQ or just FAQ . It depends if you pronounce it in your head as F-A-Q, or fak, and whether you consider it singlular or plural. FAQ.
In some languages you would replace an accented letter or ligature with two characters.

Learning More

Oracle’s Javadoc on Normalizer class : available:

on the web at Oracle.com
in the current JDK 1.7.0_04 or in the old JDK 1.6.0_32 on your local Windows J: drive.

Oracle’s Javadoc on Normalizer.Form : available:

on the web at Oracle.com
in the current JDK 1.7.0_04 or in the old JDK 1.6.0_32 on your local Windows J: drive.

entities
Punycode
Unicode
Unicode normal forms

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