From: Axel Etzold <AEtzold@...>
Date: 2009-04-13T02:57:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Problem when removing accents from a String

Dear C�sar,

have you also tried iconv (http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/iconv/rdoc/classes/Iconv.html )?
A quick fix might be to use it to convert between different, incompatible
encodings, ignoring the accents (which occur in utf-8 or iso-8859-1 encoding, but not in the target ascii encoding).

I can't try it out on Windows XP right now, but you can see some discussion and examples here: 

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/70827

Another option might be to use the HTML entities gem.
It gives you the names of the accented character, and you can then
remove the accents in a small routine using regexps,

require 'rubygems'
require 'htmlentities'
coder = HTMLEntities.new
string = "<�lan>"
res=coder.encode(string, :named)       # => "&lt;&eacute;lan&gt;"

and replace the name of the accent with a regexp: 

res.gsub(/&(.)(acute|grave|circ|tilde|cedil|ring|slash);/,'\1')

This works well for the western European and northern European languages,
but it fails for some accents of middle Eastern European languages, such as the  Polish ogoneks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogonek) and the carons of Czech : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacek) ...


Best regards,

Axel 
-- 
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