See ["How do comment @replies work?"][1] and ["@Peter works for Péter Török?"][2]. Comment replies *will* often work with unicode. EG: Péter Török can be reached by both `@Peter` and `@Péter`. ---------- These are the *documented* rules (Not checked against latest source) for converting user `display_name` to comment-reply `@names`: 1. Remove any spaces. 2. [Single quotes, dots, dashes and underscores should **not** be removed.][3] 3. [Special characters are replaced with their simple equivalent.][4] The rules for that were last documented in [this answer from Jeff Atwood][5]. For convenience the last posted remap code was: <!-- language: lang-c# --> public static string RemapInternationalCharToAscii (char c) { string s = c.ToString ().ToLowerInvariant (); if ("àåáâäãåa".Contains (s) ) { return "a"; } else if ("èéêëe".Contains (s) ) { return "e"; } else if ("ìíîïi".Contains (s) ) { return "i"; } else if ("òóôõöøoð".Contains (s) ) { return "o"; } else if ("ùúûüuu".Contains (s) ) { return "u"; } else if ("çccc".Contains (s) ) { return "c"; } else if ("zzž".Contains (s) ) { return "z"; } else if ("ssšs".Contains (s) ) { return "s"; } else if ("ñn".Contains (s) ) { return "n"; } else if ("ýÿ".Contains (s) ) { return "y"; } else if ("gg".Contains (s) ) { return "g"; } else if (c == 'r') { return "r"; } else if (c == 'l') { return "l"; } else if (c == 'd') { return "d"; } else if (c == 'ß') { return "ss"; } else if (c == 'Þ') { return "th"; } else if (c == 'h') { return "h"; } else if (c == 'j') { return "j"; } else { return ""; } } [1]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/43020/148310 [2]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/48968/148310 [3]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/51913/148310 [4]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/49409/148310 [5]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/7696/148310