Back to Basic

Converts (most) european special characters to basic latin characters. Is super tiny (720B zipped)

Which characters does it include?

Currently the following characters (upper- and lowercase) are converted as follows:

àáâãå => a
äæ => ae
ç => c
èéêë => e
ƒ => f
ìíîïı => i
ñ => n
òóôõø => o
öœ => oe
ß => ss
š => s
þð => th
ùúû => u
ü => ue
ýÿ => y
ž => z

how do i use it?

As back-to-basic is UMD you can either require it or load it directly into your browser

require/import

import b2b from 'back-to-basic';

b2b('thè qûìçk bròwñ ƒóx júmpš øvër ðë låžÿ dõg');
// => "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

global in browser

<script src="some/path/to/b2b.js"></script>
<script>
b2b('thè qûìçk bròwñ ƒóx júmpš øvër ðë låžÿ dõg');
// => "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
</script>

the character map

if you want to do something directly with the character map used to convert it is available as a named export

// es5
var characterMap = require('back-to-basic').characterMap;
// es6
import { characterMap } from 'back-to-basic';

the thing with "ß"

This wonderful character of the german language has its very own quirks. First of all it actually has an uppercase representation the wonderful "ẞ". A fact that was unknown to me when starting to write this small module (Fun fact: I am german) (more on that topic can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E

le problem

So how does this affect anything? The thing is browsers dont know what to do with it. At the time of writing "ß".toUpperCase() in Chrome produces SS (the correct way to handle "ß" until 2010 (apparently)) while Firefox plays dump and just returns ß again.

what does it mean?

Basically nothing, just that if you were to transform a word with all capital letters and an "ß" in between, it will be transformed to a lowercase ss not an uppercase one. Thats it :).