Converting Special Characters with Laravel's transliterate Method

Need to convert special characters to their ASCII equivalents? Laravel's Str::transliterate method provides a simple solution for normalizing text content.

Basic Usage

Convert special characters to ASCII:

use Illuminate\Support\Str;

$email = Str::transliterate('ⓣⓔⓢⓣ@ⓛⓐⓡⓐⓥⓔⓛ.ⓒⓞⓜ');
// Result: 'test@laravel.com'

Real-World Example

Here's how you might use it in a text normalization service:

class TextNormalizer
{
    public function normalizeUserInput(array $input)
    {
        return collect($input)->map(function ($value) {
            return is_string($value) 
                ? Str::transliterate($value)
                : $value;
        })->all();
    }

    public function sanitizeUsername(string $username)
    {
        return Str::transliterate($username);
    }

    public function cleanEmailAddress(string $email)
    {
        return strtolower(Str::transliterate($email));
    }

    public function normalizeTags(array $tags)
    {
        return array_map(function ($tag) {
            return Str::transliterate($tag);
        }, $tags);
    }
}

// Usage
class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function store(Request $request, TextNormalizer $normalizer)
    {
        $normalizedInput = $normalizer->normalizeUserInput([
            'username' => $request->username,
            'email' => $request->email,
            'tags' => $request->tags
        ]);

        // Create user with normalized data
        User::create($normalizedInput);
    }
}

The transliterate method makes it easy to ensure consistent text formatting across your application.

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