quick and dirty way to clean a string from any non-word-characters, while keeping something that looks similar

reduceSpecialChars.js

var reduceSpecialChars = function(input) {
	let normalized = input.toLocaleLowerCase().normalize("NFKD");
	normalized = normalized.replace("ß","ss");
	bytes = [];
	for (var i = 0; i < normalized.length; ++i)
	{
		charCode = normalized.charCodeAt(i);
		bytes.push(charCode & 0xFF);
	}
	temp = "";
	for (var i = 0; i < bytes.length; ++i)
	{
		temp = temp + String.fromCharCode(bytes[i])
	}
	return temp.replace(/\W/g, "");
}