parsing bibtex entries question

[Angus Leeming]

How do I best deal with BibTeX entries such as 
        Stamenovi\'{c}
or
        L\"{o}hner

so that I can have pretty names in the citation dialog?

At the moment I have this, where someFunc() is undefined!

        string name = "Stamenovi\'{c}";
        for (int i = 0; i < name.size()-5; ++i) {
                if (!(name[i] == '\' && name[i+2] == '{' && name[i+4] == '}')) 
continue;
                char accent = name[i+1];
                char c = name[i+3];

                char accented = someFunc(c, accent);
                name = name.substr(0,i) + string(1,accented) + name.substr(i+5);
        }

So, my question becomes:
        Is this the best way to do this and, if so, what goes in someFunc()?

Angus