# Reducing filename to ASCII

**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reducing-filename-to-ascii/3971
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [October 29, 2006, 5:49pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reducing-filename-to-ascii/3971 "2006-10-29T17:49:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![chrisjj](https://community.mp3tag.de/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a698b9/32.png) [@chrisjj](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/chrisjj)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2006, 5:49pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reducing-filename-to-ascii/3971/1 "2006-10-29T17:49:17Z")

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Can anyone suggest how to program an Action to reduce filenames to ASCII, i.e. replacing any international characters with their ASCII base equivalents, such as ñ -\> n ? Thanks.

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### Author: ![chrisjj](https://community.mp3tag.de/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a698b9/32.png) [@chrisjj](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/chrisjj)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2007, 7:48pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reducing-filename-to-ascii/3971/2 "2007-05-05T19:48:50Z")

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Please, anyone?

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### Author: ![Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/user_avatar/community.mp3tag.de/florian/32/5759_2.png) [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2007, 6:15pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reducing-filename-to-ascii/3971/3 "2007-05-17T18:15:17Z")

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Maybe just use many Replace actions for this.

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### Author: ![chrisjj](https://community.mp3tag.de/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a698b9/32.png) [@chrisjj](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/chrisjj)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2007, 7:18pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reducing-filename-to-ascii/3971/4 "2007-10-03T19:18:03Z")

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Thanks. I've made a action group which covers my common ones:

Replace "\_FILENAME": "á" -\> "a"  
Replace "\_FILENAME": "é" -\> "e"  
Replace "\_FILENAME": "í" -\> "i"  
Replace "\_FILENAME": "ñ" -\> "n"  
Replace "\_FILENAME": "ó" -\> "o"  
Replace "\_FILENAME": "ú" -\> "u"

but to cover all the non-ACSII chars would require hundreds of actions!

How about a function $asciify(string,to)? It would replace all chars outside 32-126 with the unaccented equivalent if any, else with 'to'.

PS Where Mp3tag/help/options\_format.html#shorten says "there is a 64 character limit for filenames with the ISO9660 standard", that should read "...with the Joliet standard".

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### Author: ![system](https://community.mp3tag.de/uploads/default/original/2X/c/ce7035d426cb755a7916793326d23b465222a407.png) [@system](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/system)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2026, 12:19pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/reducing-filename-to-ascii/3971/5 "2026-02-09T12:19:58Z")

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