>Does anyone have a piece of code which will convert foreign accents to spaces or at least recognise foreign accents in a string?
>
>I know I have done this in the past but I cant find the code

Foreign is in the eyes of the observer. And mind you, for sake of political correctness, these are international characters (whereas ABC are not, they are probably national... but hey, PC speak doesn't require logic, it's political ergo willful).

Chrtran() is your friend in this case.