We receive UTF-8 compliant data from a 3rd party system. Our system can handle it since it is also UTF-8 compliant. The problem is that old downstream systems can not always handle characters with a decimal value > 127 and either break or display the data incorrectly.

Since we do not have control over the downstream systems, the only way to fix this issue is to convert the “extended” Ascii characters to their “base” (Ascii < 128) values e.g. ê, ë must become e, or ò, ö must become o, etc.

Is there a way to achieve this in Java without having to hard code the mappings?