PHP Conference Nagoya 2025

Transliterator::transliterate

transliterator_transliterate

(PHP 5 >= 5.4.0, PHP 7, PHP 8, PECL intl >= 2.0.0)

Transliterator::transliterate -- transliterator_transliterateTransliterate a string

Description

Object-oriented style

public Transliterator::transliterate(string $string, int $start = 0, int $end = -1): string|false

Procedural style

transliterator_transliterate(
    Transliterator|string $transliterator,
    string $string,
    int $start = 0,
    int $end = -1
): string|false

Transforms a string or part thereof using an ICU transliterator.

Parameters

transliterator

In the procedural version, either a Transliterator or a string from which a Transliterator can be built.

string

The string to be transformed.

start

The start index (in UTF-16 code units) from which the string will start to be transformed, inclusive. Indexing starts at 0. The text before will be left as is.

end

The end index (in UTF-16 code units) until which the string will be transformed, exclusive. Indexing starts at 0. The text after will be left as is.

Return Values

The transformed string on success, or false on failure.

Examples

Example #1 Converting escaped UTF-16 code units

<?php
$s
= "\u304A\u65E9\u3046\u3054\u3056\u3044\u307E\u3059";
echo
transliterator_transliterate("Hex-Any/Java", $s), "\n";

//now the reverse operation with a supplementary character
$supplChar = html_entity_decode('&#x1D11E;');
echo
mb_strlen($supplChar, "UTF-8"), "\n";
$encSupplChar = transliterator_transliterate("Any-Hex/Java", $supplChar);
//echoes two encoded UTF-16 code units
echo $encSupplChar, "\n";
//and back
echo transliterator_transliterate("Hex-Any/Java", $encSupplChar), "\n";
?>

The above example will output something similar to:

お早うございます
1
\uD834\uDD1E
𝄞

See Also

add a note

User Contributed Notes 5 notes

up
38
simonsimcity at gmail dot com
11 years ago
I pretty much like the idea of hdogan, but there's at least one group of characters he's missing: ligature characters.
They're at least used in Norwegian and I read something about French, too ... Some are just used for styling (f.e. fi)

Here's an example that supports all characters (should at least, according to the documentation):
<?php
var_dump
(transliterator_transliterate('Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII; Lower()', "A æ Übérmensch på høyeste nivå! И я люблю PHP! fi"));
// string(41) "a ae ubermensch pa hoyeste niva! i a lublu php! fi"
?>

In this example any character will firstly be converted to a latin character. If that's finished, replace all latin characters by their ASCII replacement.
up
9
simonsimcity at gmail dot com
10 years ago
Sorry, for posting it again, but I found a bug in my code:

If you have a character, like the cyrillic ь (a soft-sign - no sound), the "Any-Latin" would translate it to a prime-character, and the "Latin-ASCII" doesn't touch prime-characters. Therefore I added an option to remove all characters, that are higher than \u0100.

Here's my new code, including an example:

var_dump(transliterator_transliterate('Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII; [\u0100-\u7fff] remove',
"A æ Übérmensch på høyeste nivå! И я люблю PHP! есть. fi"));
// string(50) "A ae Ubermensch pa hoyeste niva! I a lublu PHP! est. fi"

Another approach, I found quite helpful (if you by no way want to remove characters ...), try to use iconv() in addition. This surely will just return ASCII characters.

See: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3542748/517914

Also an example here:

var_dump(iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE", transliterator_transliterate('Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII',
"A æ Übérmensch på høyeste nivå! И я люблю PHP! есть. fi"));
// string(50) "A ae Ubermensch pa hoyeste niva! I a lublu PHP! est'. fi"
up
12
hdogan at gmail dot com
12 years ago
You can create slugs easily with:

<?php
function slugify($string) {
$string = transliterator_transliterate("Any-Latin; NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFC; [:Punctuation:] Remove; Lower();", $string);
$string = preg_replace('/[-\s]+/', '-', $string);
return
trim($string, '-');
}

echo
slugify("Я люблю PHP!");
?>
up
-2
Anonymous
8 years ago
There are some possibly undesirable conversions with ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE or your users may require some custom stuff.

You might want to run a substitution up front for certain things, such as when you want 3 letter ISO codes to replace currency symbols. £ transliterates to "lb", for example, which is incorrect since it's a currency symbol, not a weight symbol (#).

ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE does a great job within the realm of possibility :-)

When it doesn't do something you want it to, you can set up a CSV with one replacement per line and run a function like:

function stripByMap($inputString, $mapFile)
{
$csv = file($mapFile);
foreach($csv as $line)
{
$arrLine = explode(',', trim($line));
$inputString = str_replace($arrLine[0],$arrLine[1],$inputString);
}
return $inputString;
}

or you can write some regexes. Transliterating using ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE works so well that your map probably won't be very long...
up
-5
jinmoku at hotmail dot com
13 years ago
OOP version :

<?php
$str
= 'àáâãäçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöùúûüýÿ
ÀÁÂÃÄÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕÖÙÚÛÜÝ'
;
$rule = 'NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFC';

$myTrans = Transliterator::create($rule);
echo
$myTrans->transliterate($str);

//aaaaaceeeeiiiinooooouuuuyy
//AAAAACEEEEIIIINOOOOOUUUUY
?>
To Top