title: PHP Convert exotic characters to a-z A-Z 0-9
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/158241/php-replace-umlauts-with-closest-7-bit-ascii-equivalent-in-an-utf-8-string">PHP: Replace umlauts with closest 7-bit ASCII equivalent in an UTF-8 string</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>I will be dealing with an external source that may give me data back like : <br/><br/>
  <code>Tōkyō  à á â ã</code> </p>
  
  <p>is there a way to convert the fancy characters to standard a-z A-Z <br/><br/>
  <code>Tokyo  a a a a</code></p>
  
  <p>If there are other characters that don't match with any alphabet, they could be ignored. </p>
  
  <p>Is a large regex with all the <code>from</code> and <code>to</code> values the only way, or, is there a simpler way to go about it?</p>