From: Max Williams <toastkid.williams@...>
Date: 2008-04-22T18:46:23+09:00
Subject: character substitution using tr()

I'm using a method that i found at the acts as ferret site:

http://projects.jkraemer.net/acts_as_ferret/#UTF-8support

which is intended to strip accents out of strings, turning for example
"La Bohème" into "La Boheme".  Here's the method:

def strip_diacritics(s)
    # latin1 subset only
    s.tr("ÀÁÂÃÄÅÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝàáâãäåçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ",
         "AAAAAACEEEEIIIINOOOOOOUUUUYaaaaaaceeeeiiiinoooooouuuuyy").
      gsub(/Æ/, "AE").
      gsub(/Ð/, "Eth").
      gsub(/Þ/, "THORN").
      gsub(/ß/, "ss").
      gsub(/æ/, "ae").
      gsub(/ð/, "eth").
      gsub(/þ/, "thorn")
  end

However, it's breaking for me: è is turned into "yy".  I think this is
to do with the number of bytes used:  the first string passed to tr()
uses 2 bytes per character while the second uses 1 byte per character:

"ÀÁÂÃÄÅÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝàáâãäåçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ".size
  => 110

"AAAAAACEEEEIIIINOOOOOOUUUUYaaaaaaceeeeiiiinoooooouuuuyy".size
  => 55

Assuming this is the problem, can anyone tell me how to get around it?
I know next to nothing about character encoding: i tried converting both
translation strings to utf8 with String#toutf8, but that didn't make any
difference.

thanks, max
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