I'm working for an online travel agency, and our application is ** or tries to be ** utf-8 compatible because we have to deal with names from all around the globe. This application talks to reservation systems, some of them accept utf8 but some others -really old- only accept ASCII.
A quick solution could be either wipe out non-ASCII chars ( i.e: Marķa becomes Mara ) or transform them to the closest ASCII one ( i.e: Marķa becomes Maria ), that works ok for Spanish, German and some other occidental names. The main problem either approach present is when you have to deal with oriental names ( Korean, Japanese, Chinese, etc ), where there isn't a direct translation between utf8 and ascii and if you wipe out non-ascii chars you would end up with empty string.
Said that my questions are:
- Did you have to deal with something like this? If so what was your approach?
- Is there any Perl module that helps translating things into ASCII in a reliable way?