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