unidecode

What is unidecode?

The unidecode npm package is used to transliterate Unicode text into plain ASCII characters. This is particularly useful for converting non-Latin scripts into a readable and searchable format.

What are unidecode's main functionalities?

Basic Transliteration

This feature allows you to convert non-Latin scripts into their closest ASCII representation. For example, Chinese characters are converted to their pinyin equivalents.

const unidecode = require('unidecode');
console.log(unidecode('你好，世界')); // Output: Ni Hao , Shi Jie

Handling Accented Characters

This feature removes accents from Latin characters, making them plain ASCII. This is useful for normalizing text for search or comparison.

const unidecode = require('unidecode');
console.log(unidecode('Café')); // Output: Cafe

Transliteration of Special Characters

This feature converts special characters and ligatures into their ASCII equivalents, making the text more universally readable.

const unidecode = require('unidecode');
console.log(unidecode('Æther')); // Output: AEther

Other packages similar to unidecode

transliteration

The transliteration package provides similar functionality to unidecode by converting Unicode text to ASCII. It also supports custom transliteration rules, which can be useful for specific use cases.

diacritics

The diacritics package focuses on removing diacritical marks from characters, similar to unidecode's handling of accented characters. It is simpler and more lightweight, making it suitable for projects that only need this specific functionality.

slugify

The slugify package converts strings into URL-friendly slugs, which includes transliterating non-ASCII characters to ASCII. While its primary use case is different, it offers similar transliteration capabilities as unidecode.

README

Unidecode for NodeJS

---

Unidecode is JavaScript port of the perl module Text::Unicode. It takes UTF-8 data and tries to represent it in US-ASCII characters (i.e., the universally displayable characters between 0x00 and 0x7F). The representation is almost always an attempt at transliteration -- i.e., conveying, in Roman letters, the pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing system.

See Text::Unicode for the original README file, including methodology and limitations.

Note that all the files named 'x??.js' in data are derived directly from the equivalent perl file, and both sets of files are distributed under the perl license not the BSD license.

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Installation

$ npm install unidecode

Usage

$ node
> var unidecode = require('unidecode');
> unidecode("aéà)àçé");
'aea)ace'
> unidecode("に間違いがないか、再度確認してください。再読み込みしてください。");
'niJian Wei iganaika, Zai Du Que Ren sitekudasai. Zai Du miIp misitekudasai. '

Advanced Usage

Custom Substitution Values

For values that cannot be translated, empty strings are returned. You can override this behavior by passing a custom substitution value as the second argument to unidecode:

$ node
> var unidecode = require('unidecode');
> unidecode("ab\uFFFFc", "X");
'abXc'
> unidecode("ab\uFFFFc");
'abc'

Changelog

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