Unicode to ASCII transliteration

Web Demo

• Description Examples
• Implementations: C Go Java JavaScript Julia PHP Python Ruby Rust Shell .NET
• Background Stats Unidecode Sources

Converts Unicode characters to their best ASCII representation

AnyAscii provides ASCII-only replacement strings for practically all Unicode characters. Text is converted character-by-character without considering the context. The mappings for each script are based on popular existing romanization systems. Symbolic characters are converted based on their meaning or appearance. All ASCII characters in the input are left unchanged, every other character is replaced with printable ASCII characters. Unknown characters and some known characters are replaced with an empty string and removed.

Representative examples for different languages comparing the AnyAscii output to the conventional romanization:

AnyAscii is implemented across multiple programming languages with the same behavior and versioning

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anyascii/anyascii/master/impl/c/anyascii.h https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anyascii/anyascii/master/impl/c/anyascii.c

https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/anyascii/go

import "github.com/anyascii/go"

s := anyascii.Transliterate("άνθρωποι")
// anthropoi

Go 1.10+ compatible

https://jitpack.io/#com.anyascii/anyascii

String s = AnyAscii.transliterate("άνθρωποι");
// anthropoi

Java 6+ compatible

https://npmjs.com/package/any-ascii

import anyAscii from 'any-ascii';

const s = anyAscii('άνθρωποι');
// anthropoi

npm install any-ascii

https://juliahub.com/ui/Packages/AnyAscii/wYZIV

julia> using AnyAscii
julia> anyascii("άνθρωποι")
"anthropoi"

Julia 1.0+ compatible

pkg> add AnyAscii

https://packagist.org/packages/anyascii/anyascii

$s = AnyAscii::transliterate('άνθρωποι');
// anthropoi

PHP 5.3+ compatible

composer require anyascii/anyascii

https://pypi.org/project/anyascii

from anyascii import anyascii

s = anyascii('άνθρωποι')
assert s == 'anthropoi'

Python 3.3+ compatible

pip install anyascii

https://rubygems.org/gems/any_ascii

require 'any_ascii'

s = AnyAscii.transliterate('άνθρωποι')
# anthropoi

Ruby 2.0+ compatible

gem install any_ascii

https://crates.io/crates/any_ascii

use any_ascii::any_ascii;

let s = any_ascii("άνθρωποι");
// anthropoi

Rust 1.36+ compatible

# Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
any_ascii = "*"

Install executable: cargo install any_ascii

$ anyascii άνθρωποι
anthropoi

$ echo άνθρωποι | anyascii
anthropoi

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anyascii/anyascii/master/impl/sh/anyascii

$ anyascii άνθρωποι
anthropoi

$ echo άνθρωποι | anyascii
anthropoi

POSIX-compliant

https://nuget.org/packages/AnyAscii

// C#
using AnyAscii;

string s = "άνθρωποι".Transliterate();
// anthropoi

Unicode is the foundation for text in all modern software: it’s how all mobile phones, desktops, and other computers represent the text of every language *

Unicode is the universal character set, a global standard to support all the world's languages. It contains 140,000+ characters used by 150+ scripts along with various symbols. Typically encoded into bytes using UTF-8.

ASCII is the most compatible character set, established in 1967. It is a subset of Unicode and UTF-8 consisting of 128 characters. The printable characters are English letters, digits, and punctuation, with the remaining being control characters. The characters found on a standard US keyboard are from ASCII.

... expressed only in the original non-control ASCII range so as to be as widely compatible with as many existing tools, languages, and serialization formats as possible and avoid display issues in text editors and source control *

A language is written using characters from a script. A script can be alphabetic, logographic, or syllabic. Some languages use multiple scripts and some scripts are used by multiple languages. The Latin script is used in English and many other languages.

When converting text between languages there are multiple properties that can be preserved:

• Meaning: Translation
• Sound: Transcription
• Spelling: Transliteration

Romanization is the conversion into the Latin script using transliteration and transcription. Romanization is most commonly used when representing the names of people and places.

Geographical names are Romanized to help foreigners find the place they intend to go to and help them remember cities, villages and mountains they visited and climbed. But it is Koreans who make up the Roman transcription of their proper names to print on their business cards and draw up maps for international tourists. Sometimes, they write the lyrics of a Korean song in Roman letters to help foreigners join in a singing session or write part of a public address (in Korean) in Roman letters for a visiting foreign VIP. In this sense, it is for both foreigners and the local public. The Romanization system must not be a code only for the native English-speaking community here but an important tool for international communication between Korean society, foreign residents in the country and the entire external world. *

Supports Unicode 14.0 (2021). Covers 99k of the 144k total Unicode characters, missing 43k very rare CJK characters and 2k other rare characters.

Bundled data files total 200-500 KB depending on the implementation

AnyAscii is an alternative to (and inspired by) Unidecode and its many ports. Unidecode was created in 2001 and only supports the basic mulitlingual plane. AnyAscii gives better results, supports more than twice as many characters, and often has a smaller file size. For a complete comparison between AnyAscii and Unidecode see table.tsv and unidecode/table.tsv.

ALA-LC, BGN/PCGN, Discord, ISO, KNAB, NFKD, UNGEGN, Unihan, national standards, and more