Jozef Jarosciak - Blog

Accent/Diacritics Remover 1.0 - Remove foreign accents in text/subtitle files.

July 20th, 2009

This program lets you load a text (subtitle) file and replace all foreign diacritics (accented language characters) with their english substitutes!

This is of particular help for those who need to display Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Turkish and other language special characters in subtitles, for watching on Media Servers which do not support character encoding (one example is PS3 Media Server; or D-LINK DSM-320 Wireless Media Player).

This little utility converts:

Slovak Letters like : Á á Ä ä Č č Ď ď É é Í í Ĺ ĺ Ľ ľ Ň ň Ó ó Ô ô Ŕ ŕ Š š Ť ť Ú ú Ý ý Ž ž
to : A a A a C c D d E e I i L l L l N n O o O o R r S s T t U u Y y Z z

or Hungarian:
“Á á É é Ě ě Í í Ň ň Ó ó Ö ö Ő ő”
to “A a E e E e I i N n O o O o O o”

or Czech:
“Á á Č č Ď ď É é Ě ě Í í Ň ň Ó ó Ř ř Š š Ť ť Ú ú Ů ů Ý ý Ž ž”
to: “A a C c D d E e E e I i N n O o R r S s T t U u U u Y y Z z”

or Turkish:
“Ç ç Ğ ğ Ö ö Ş ş Ü ü”
to: “C c G g O o S s U u”

anyhow, you get the point…

I couldn’t find anything on the net, so I wrote the program myself.
I am giving it out, free of charge, in case someone comes accross the similar diacritic related issues and needs to convert a subtitle file to a one with removed foreign accents.

I wrote it in VB.NET 2005 and you will need to have Microsoft Framework 2.0 installed in order to run it.

If you want to download the program, here is the link to a zip file:
DeleteDiacritics.zip

So good luck and if someone wants to look at the source code, just drop me a line…

————
PS. I have tested the program only on my Windows Xp and Vista machine…
Also considering I didn’t spend much time writting it, there could still be some bugs.

Entry Filed under: English Blog, Software