How to normalize a string with special characters (Efraïm to Efraim for example)

Is there a simple way (other than replaceAll() going through all posibilities) to normalize a string with special characters to a string without?

I think I'v'e found the correct java to handle this, however I'm not sure how to implement this within Mendix.

http://www.programcreek.com/java-api-examples/java.text.Normalizer

/**
 * Turns html encoded text into plain text.
 *
 * Replaces &amp;ouml; type of expressions into &uml;<br/>
 * Removes accents<br/>
 * Replaces multiple whitespaces with a single space.<br/>
 *
 * @param text
 * @return
 */
public static String cleanText(String text) {
	text = unicodeTrim(text);

	// replace all multiple whitespaces by a single space
	Matcher matcher = WHITESPACE_PATTERN.matcher(text);
    text = matcher.replaceAll("");

	// turn accented characters into normalized form. Turns &ouml; into o"
	text = Normalizer.normalize(text, Normalizer.Form.NFD);

	// removes the marks found in the previous line.
	text = REMOVE_ACCENT_PATTERN.matcher(text).replaceAll("");

	// lowercase everything
	text = text.toLowerCase();
	return text;
}