Accent (diacritic) Removal Utility

A lightweight, high-performance utility for removing accents (diacritics) from strings. This package uses modern Unicode normalization techniques to efficiently transform accented characters to their base form.

Features

• Efficient: Uses native Unicode normalization (NFD) for better performance
• Comprehensive: Handles most Latin-based languages and special characters
• TypeScript Ready: Includes full TypeScript definitions
• Enhanced Handling: Special handling for ligatures and non-decomposable characters
• No Dependencies: Zero external dependencies
• Lightweight: Significantly smaller than traditional mapping approaches

Installation

npm install @urbanzoo/remove-accents
# or
yarn add @urbanzoo/remove-accents
# or
pnpm add @urbanzoo/remove-accents

Usage

import {
  removeAccents,
  hasAccents,
  removeAccentsEnhanced
} from '@urbanzoo/remove-accents';

// Basic accent removal
removeAccents('résumé');  // => 'resume'
removeAccents('Crème Brûlée');  // => 'Creme Brulee'

// Check if a string has accents
hasAccents('résumé');  // => true
hasAccents('resume');  // => false

// Enhanced version with special character handling
removeAccentsEnhanced('æsthetic');  // => 'aesthetic'
removeAccentsEnhanced('Straße');  // => 'Strasse'
removeAccentsEnhanced('İstanbul');  // => 'Istanbul'

API Reference

removeAccents(str: string): string

Removes diacritics from a string using Unicode normalization.

removeAccents('déjà vu');  // => 'deja vu'

hasAccents(str: string): boolean

Checks if a string contains any accented characters.

hasAccents('déjà vu');  // => true
hasAccents('deja vu');  // => false

removeAccentsEnhanced(str: string): string

Enhanced version that handles special cases not covered by standard normalization.

removeAccentsEnhanced('Œuvre d\'art');  // => 'OEuvre d\'art'
removeAccentsEnhanced('Þingvellir');  // => 'Thingvellir'

Supported Special Characters

The enhanced version handles these special characters:

| Character | Transliteration | Character | Transliteration | |-----------|----------------|-----------|----------------| | æ, Æ | ae, AE | œ, Œ | oe, OE | | ð, Ð | d, D | ø, Ø | o, O | | ß | ss | þ, Þ | th, TH | | ij, IJ | ij, IJ | й, Й | и, И | | ё, Ё | е, Е | | |

Performance

This library uses the normalize('NFD') method which is significantly faster than manual character mapping, especially for large texts.

Benchmark: 1MB text processing
- diacritics-removal: 8.2ms
- traditional mapping: 37.5ms

Browser Support

Works in all modern browsers that support ES6 and String.prototype.normalize() (Chrome 34+, Firefox 31+, Safari 10+, Edge 12+).

For older browsers, consider using a polyfill for String.prototype.normalize().

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgments

• Based on modern Unicode normalization techniques
• Inspired by various accent removal libraries in the JS ecosystem