TL;DR

On with TASK #2 from The Weekly Challenge #186. Enjoy!

The challenge

You are given a string with possible unicode characters.

Create a subroutine sub makeover($str) that replace the unicode characters with ascii equivalent. For this task, let us assume it only contains alphabets. Example 1

Input: $str = 'ÃÊÍÒÙ';
Output: 'AEIOU'

Example 2

Input: $str = 'âÊíÒÙ';
Output: 'aEiOU'

The questions

Should I learn everything about Unicode?

The solution

There is a high probability that this will not be a correct solution, whatever.

I’ll look for a decomposition and check if the first part is an ASCII letter, taking it if true or the whole char if not.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.24;
use warnings;
use experimental 'signatures';
no warnings 'experimental::signatures';
use Unicode::UCD 'charinfo';
use utf8;

say makeover('âÊíÒÙ whatever123 ÃÊÍÒÙ');

sub makeover ($str) {
   return join '', map {
      my $info = charinfo(ord $_);
      my ($basic_hex) = split m{\s+}mxs, $info->{decomposition};
      my $basic = hex($basic_hex // '00');
      my $is_latin_letter =
         (ord('a') <= $basic && $basic <= ord('z'))
         || (ord('A') <= $basic && $basic <= ord('Z'));
      $is_latin_letter ? chr($basic) : $_;
   } split m{}mxs, $str;
}

I should have probably used Text::Undiacritic but whatever.

Same approach in Raku:

#!/usr/bin/env raku
use v6;
sub MAIN {
   put makeover('âÊíÒÙ whatever123 ÃÊÍÒÙ');
}

sub makeover ($str) {
   $str.comb(/./)».NFD.map(
      -> $c {
         my ($basic) = $c.list;
         ('a'.ord <= $basic <= 'z'.ord) || ('A'.ord <= $basic <= 'Z'.ord)
         ?? $basic.chr !! $c;
      }
   ).join('');
}

Enough for today, stay safe!