Re: "Unidecode" functionality in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: John Mastro <john.b.mastro@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2018 15:04:29 -0700
> 
> There are "Unidecode" packages for Perl[1], Python[2], and Emacs[3]
> (derived from one another in that order). They each transliterate
> Unicode text to ASCII, e.g.:
> 
>     (unidecode "Déjà vu")
>     ;=> "Deja vu"
>     (unidecode "北亰")
>     ;=> "Bei Jing "
> 
> Does Emacs have equivalent functionality built-in?

It's possible to remove accents (the first example) using the
functionality in ucs-normalize.el.  Some transliteration is possible
for scripts for which there exists a "transliteration" input method,
using the code by Michael Welsh Duggan posted here:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-02/msg00387.html

For example, you can transliterate Cyrillic text using the
cyrillic-translit input method that comes with Emacs.  But there are
no general-purpose transliteration capabilities in Emacs, AFAIK.

However, it looks like the Perl package is just a huge database of
precomputed transliterations, in which case doing the same in Emacs
Lisp should be almost trivial.