r - Convert accented characters into ascii character

Question

What is the optimal way to to remove German (or French) accents from a vector of 16 million string variables.

e.g., 'Sj?gren's syndrome' into 'Sjogren's syndrome'

Converstion of single character into a single character is better then transliteration such as

? => ae ? => oe ü => ue.

e.g., using regular expression would be one option but is there something better (R package for this)?

gsub('ü','u',gsub('?','o',"Sj?gren's syndrome ( über) "))

There are SO solutions for non-R platforms but not a good one for R.

Answer 1

Use iconv to convert to ASCII with transliteration (if supported):

iconv(c("über","Sj?gren's"),to="ASCII//TRANSLIT")
[1] "uber"      "Sjogren's"