How to translate French characters (vowels) to english equivalent

[kthibeault1965]

does anyone know how to accomplish the following?

I currently have a mysql db table where the default character set for
the character columns is LATIN1.

Currently I have French words including : Fraîcheur - notice the î

How do I convert this to an i ??
I currently do a dump of the table via php that prepares a sql insert
statement so that data can be loaded into another mysql database,
which also has a LATIN1 character set for the destination table.

HOWEVER - as this destination table is for an english speaking user,
I need to translate the french letters to their english equivelant
via my php script.

Can this be done? The character set is the same on both the target
and source tables. One other issue is that, depending on the tool I
use to import the text file values, sometimes the letters are LOST
entirely, and produce a "?" where the letter should go. this is an
annoyance, but also another reason to move the english version of the
letters.

THANKS for your help

[bogu]

You should use UTF-8 collation and ppl`s can write even with chinese symbols ...

[kthibeault1965]

I dont have control over the target db, so the sql insert text file that i produce, must have the letters already translated.

The characters written to the sql file, must be the English equivalent.

I do not need help with HTML translation on the presentation layer. I need to know how to actually translate the letters themselves on the fly.

I need some function like htmlspecialchars but NOT just for html chars.

I need to write the English equivalent to the text file

thanks!

[jeremyphphaven]

You can create an array of characters to convert with their english counters.

or you can scratch all this and do it by XML

[kthibeault1965]

I can do that i guess, can you give me an idea of what the code would look like?
thanks