Which accents and marks are removed?

All French diacritics are stripped: the acute on é, the grave on à è ù, the circumflex on â ê î ô û, the diaeresis or tréma on ë ï ü, and the cedilla on ç. The base letter is kept, so é becomes e and ç becomes c.

How are the ligatures œ and æ handled?

Ligatures are not single accented letters, so they are expanded rather than stripped. The tool maps œ to oe and æ to ae, with uppercase Œ and Æ becoming OE and AE, preserving the case of the original.

Is the letter case preserved?

Yes. Removing a diacritic keeps the case of the base letter, so É becomes E and é becomes e. Ligature expansion also preserves case, turning Œuvre into OEuvre and œuvre into oeuvre.

How does the tool work technically?

It first expands the ligatures, then applies Unicode NFD normalisation, which splits each accented letter into a base letter plus a combining mark. It removes the combining marks in the U+0300 to U+036F range and recomposes the result, leaving clean ASCII.

When would I need ASCII French text?

Plain ASCII is useful for URL slugs, email local parts, usernames, filenames, sort keys, and older databases or APIs that do not handle accented characters reliably. Stripping accents avoids encoding errors and mojibake in those systems.

French Diacritic Remover

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This tool removes the diacritics from French text and expands its ligatures to produce clean ASCII. It is the fast way to turn accented French into a form that URLs, usernames, filenames, and legacy systems can handle without encoding problems.

How it works

The conversion uses Unicode normalisation, which is the robust way to strip accents rather than a giant lookup table:

1. expand ligatures:  œ -> oe   Œ -> OE   æ -> ae   Æ -> AE
2. NFD normalise:     é -> e + ́ (base letter plus a combining acute mark)
3. strip marks:       remove combining range U+0300..U+036F
4. recompose (NFC)

Because NFD decomposes every accented Latin letter into a base letter plus a separate combining mark, removing that mark reliably yields the underlying letter. Ligatures have no such decomposition, so they are expanded explicitly in step one before normalisation.

Tips and notes

Case is always preserved: É becomes E, and Œuvre becomes OEuvre. The counter under the output tells you how many characters were affected, which is a quick sanity check that your text actually contained accents. Use the output for slugs and identifiers, but keep the accented original for anything a human will read, since francaise is correct only as an ASCII fallback for française.