From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2007-02-14T03:58:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Non-English characters

On Feb 13, 2007, at 7:00 PM, Thiago Arrais wrote:

> Has anyone seen a non-english characters library for Ruby walking
> around? For now, I need to remove letter decorators (in other words,
> '�' becomes n and '�' becomes a) and drop non-alphanumeric
> characters ('!etter' becomes 'etter').
>
> Those are some pretty simple functions that I could write myself
> (actually I already have), but it would be nice to use some better
> tested code.

The best approach I've seen[*] is to decompose and map to ASCII:

   Iconv.iconv('ascii//ignore//translit', 'utf-8', str)

and then sanitize.

I think this is better than the technique that passes through Unicode  
decomposition because it also handles � (ss), � (EUR), � (ae), �  
(oe), etc.

-- fxn

[*] Seen in the source of the Rails plugin acts_as_friendly_param,  
which in turn takes the idea from Mephisto.