How can I combine a character followed by a "combining accent" into a single character?
I'm taking a phrase that the user enters into a web page and submitting it to a French-English dictionary. Sometimes the dictionary lookup would fail because there are two representations for most accented characters. For example:
- é can be done in a single character:
\xE9
(latin small letter e with acute).
- But it an also be represented by two characters:
e
+ \u0301
(combining acute accent).
I always want to submit the former (single character) to the dictionary.
Right now, I'm doing that by replacing every two-character occurrence I find with the equivalent single character. But is there a simpler (i.e. one-line) way to do this, either in JavaScript or in the browser when its fetched form the input field?
function translate(phrase) {
// Combine accents into a single accented character, if necessary.
var TRANSFORM = [
// Acute accent.
[/E\u0301/g, "\xC9"], // É
[/e\u0301/g, "\xE9"], // é
// Grave accent.
[/a\u0300/g, "\xE0"], // à
[/e\u0300/g, "\xE8"], // è
[/u\u0300/g, "\xF9"], // ù
// Cedilla (no combining accent).
// Circumflex.
[/a\u0302/g, "\xE2"], // â
[/e\u0302/g, "\xEA"], // ê
[/i\u0302/g, "\xEE"], // î
[/o\u0302/g, "\xF4"], // ô
[/u\u0302/g, "\xFB"], // û
// Trema.
[/e\u0308/g, "\xEB"], // ë
[/i\u0308/g, "\xEF"], // ï
[/u\u0308/g, "\xFC"] // ü
// oe ligature (no combining accent).
];
for (var i = 0; i < TRANSFORM.length; i++)
phrase = phrase.replace(TRANSFORM[i][0], TRANSFORM[i][1]);
// Do translation.
...
}