Replacing accented characters by non-accented characters

Hello,

I've been trying to find something nice to transform an accentuated
string into a non-accentuated string. Obviously, I'm mostly playing
inside the European languages, but any method that could transform
arabic or asian characters to plain non-accentuated characters would be
perfect.

I have found a number of solutions, ranging from str_replace() for every
known accentuated character to strtr() to a preg_replace() of a
conversion of the string to html characters then removing the "&" and
the "alteration" string (acute, grave, circ, ...).

I must say the last one seems to work better because it's less affected
by charset changes, but it still seems awfully slow to me and I would
like to know if there is any function that exists that could do that for
me?

Yannick