NSString - how to go from "ÁlgeBra" to "Algebra" - iphone

Question

Does anyone knows hoe to get a NSString like "ÁlgeBra" to "Algebra", without the accent, and capitalize only the first letter?
Thanks,
RL

Answer 1

dreamlax has already mentioned the capitalizedString method. Instead of doing a lossy conversion to and from NSData to remove the accented characters, however, I think it is more elegant to use the stringByFoldingWithOptions:locale: method.
NSString *accentedString = #"ÁlgeBra";
NSString *unaccentedString = [accentedString stringByFoldingWithOptions:NSDiacriticInsensitiveSearch locale:[NSLocale currentLocale]];
NSString *capitalizedString = [unaccentedString capitalizedString];
Depending on the nature of the strings you want to convert, you might want to set a fixed locale (e.g. English) instead of using the user's current locale. That way, you can be sure to get the same results on every machine.

Answer 2

NSString has a method called capitalizedString:
Return Value
A string with the first character from each word in the receiver changed to its corresponding uppercase value, and all remaining characters set to their corresponding lowercase values.
NSString *str = #"AlgeBra";
NSString *other = [str capitalizedString];
NSLog (#"Old: %#, New: %#", str, other);
Edit:
Just saw that you would like to remove accents as well. You can go through a series of steps:
// original string
NSString *str = #"ÁlgeBra";
// convert to a data object, using a lossy conversion to ASCII
NSData *asciiEncoded = [str dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding
allowLossyConversion:YES];
// take the data object and recreate a string using the lossy conversion
NSString *other = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:asciiEncoded
encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
// relinquish ownership
[other autorelease];
// create final capitalized string
NSString *final = [other capitalizedString];
The documentation for dataUsingEncoding:allowLossyConversion: explicitly says that the letter ‘Á’ will convert to ‘A’ when converting to ASCII.

Answer 3

Here's a step by step example of how to do it. There's room for improvement, but you get the basic idea......
NSString *input = #"ÁlgeBra";
NSString *correctCase = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#%#",
[[input substringToIndex:1] uppercaseString],
[[input substringFromIndex:1] lowercaseString]];
NSString *result = [[[NSString alloc] initWithData:[correctCase dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES] encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding] autorelease];
NSLog( #"%#", result );