From: Jim Burgess <jack.zelig@...>
Date: 2010-10-05T17:03:11+09:00
Subject: Strip illegal characters from a file name

Hi,

I have a program which takes a users details and saves them in a pdf.
The name of the pdf file should consist of the users id, an underscore
and the users surname, e.g. 01_Smith.pdf

Thing is, how do I check for illegal file name characters in the
surname?
On Windows for example, the characters \/:*?"<>| are not allowed in a
file name, so obviously they shouldn't occur in the surname.

As there seem to be multiple combinations of illegal file name
characters on different operating systems, I thought about stripping
everything except letters from the surname and came up with:

surname.gsub(/[^a-zA-Z]/,"")

But as we have users from around the world, it is common for them to
have special characters in their surname (e.g. äöüß in Germany). The
above reg exp strips these out too, which isn't perfect.

Is there a reg exp which would strip out everything but letters and
leave special characters in tact or am I going about this the wrong
way??

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
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