PHP: Replace umlauts with closest 7-bit ASCII equi

Question

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.

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?

echo strtr(utf8_decode($input), 
           'ŠŒŽšœžŸ¥µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ',
           'SOZsozYYuAAAAAAACEEEEIIIIDNOOOOOOUUUUYsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiionoooooouuuuyy');

UPDATE: 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.

Answer 1

I found that this one gives the most consistent results in French and German. with the meta tag set to utf-8, I have place it in a function to return a line from a array of words and it works perfect.

htmlentities (  $line, ENT_SUBSTITUTE   , 'utf-8' )