Skip to contents

Transliterate Text to Plain ASCII

Source: R/lib_helpers.R
to_ascii.Rd

Converts a character vector to plain 7-bit ASCII, transliterating accented or non-Latin characters to their nearest ASCII equivalent (for example, an accented capital A becomes a plain "A"). Falls back to dropping any character that has no transliteration. This is the deterministic "fallback" used by ascii_fallback().

Usage

to_ascii(x)

Arguments

x

A character vector.

Value

A character vector containing only ASCII characters.

Examples

# Latin accents fold to their nearest ASCII letter.
to_ascii("Prof. \u00c1ngela Zorro Medina")  # "Prof. Angela Zorro Medina"
#> [1] "Prof. Angela Zorro Medina"

# Vectorised over the input.
to_ascii(c("Se\u00e1n", "Zo\u00eb", "na\u00efve"))
#> [1] "Sean"  "Zoe"   "naive"

# Non-Latin scripts are romanised when stringi is available.
if (requireNamespace("stringi", quietly = TRUE))
  to_ascii("\u041c\u043e\u0441\u043a\u0432\u0430")  # "Moskva" (Cyrillic)
#> [1] "Moskva"

# Either way the result is guaranteed pure 7-bit ASCII (never "?").
all(charToRaw(to_ascii("caf\u00e9")) < 128)
#> [1] TRUE