Just to let it known, some it.source contributors are using a comfortable gadget to manage diacritics - it can delete, replace or add a pretty large list of diacritical marks to any character with a single click.
It uses .normalize() string method, so decomposing-recomposing (when possible) unicode characters and allowing to manage diacritics alone indipendently from base ascii character.
Perhaps is this gadget "rediscovering the wheel"....? Anyway, the code is here: https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-pulsanti-diacritici.js
Alex brollo