"Strip accents" is not a well-defined operation outside of a specific locale. Does "Ö" have an accent or not? In German, yes: it's an O with an umlaut. In Engli

"Strip accents" is not a well-defined operation outside of a specific locale. Does "Ö" have an accent or not? In German, yes: it's an O with an umlaut. In English, yes: it's an O with some funny dots on it (heavy metal umlauts?). In the "New Yorker" dialect of English, it's an O with a dieresis. But in Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and many others, it's not: it's the letter between O and P, or between O and Ő, or after Z, or... If you do want to do this, you should know that it only makes sense in your own locale, and you shouldn't be surprised that the methods are somewhat ad-hoc (I'm not saying you shouldn't do this: I've done it myself).