[LON-CAPA-users] Perl trick to remove accents from names?

[Michael Dugdale]

Hi,

I'm looking at generating some passwords for an out-of-LON-CAPA activity from student names, with their passwords delivered via LON-CAPA.  It's fairly simple to get their first and last names through &firstname and &lastname.  However, many of our students have accented names, which would make for difficult-to enter passwords.

I was wondering if there was any safe way that, from within LON-CAPA, we could strip the accents from characters?  Typically, I might try something with the Text::Iconv modules, but I don't think loading modules is allowed from within a LON-CAPA script.

Any thoughts?

Many thanks,
Michael

Michael Dugdale
Co-chair
Department of Physics
John Abbott College
21,275 Lakeshore Road
Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Québec
H9X 3L9, Canada
(514) 457-6610 Ext. 5888
michael.dugdale at johnabbott.qc.ca