Java remove accent from string

I was recently importing data from various sources, some of which had some non-standard (unicode) characters. In particular I wanted a way to remove the accents from french letters from á to a  

I stumbled across this code which does the job perfectly:

/**
     * replace accented characters with their unicode equivalent
     * @param str
     * @return
     */
    public static String deAccent(String str) {
        String nfdNormalizedString = Normalizer.normalize(str, Normalizer.Form.NFD); 
        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+");
        return pattern.matcher(nfdNormalizedString).replaceAll("");