<p>What I want to do is to remove all accents and umlauts from a string, turning "lärm" into "larm" or "andré" into "andre". What I tried to do was to utf8_decode the string and then use strtr on it, but since my source file is saved as UTF-8 file, I can't enter the ISO-8859-15 characters for all umlauts - the editor inserts the UTF-8 characters.</p>

<p>Obviously a solution for this would be to have an include that's an ISO-8859-15 file, but there must be a better way than to have another required include?</p>

<pre><code>echo strtr(utf8_decode($input), 
           'ŠŒŽšœžŸ¥µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ',
           'SOZsozYYuAAAAAAACEEEEIIIIDNOOOOOOUUUUYsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiionoooooouuuuyy');
</code></pre>

<p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> Maybe I was a bit inaccurate with what I try to do: I do not actually want to remove the umlauts, but to replace them with their closest "one character ASCII" equivalent.</p>

Okay, found an obvious solution myself, but it's not the best concerning performance...
```
```
echo strtr(utf8_decode($input), 
           utf8_decode('ŠŒŽšœžŸ¥µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ'),
           'SOZsozYYuAAAAAAACEEEEIIIIDNOOOOOOUUUUYsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiionoooooouuuuyy');
```
```