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rubyencodingnon-ascii-characters

Convert non-ascii punctuation to ascii

I have the following string:

Your résumé’s a non–encyclopædia

Note the ’, é and æ are non-ascii. I want to leave é and æ intact, but replace the ’ with ascii quote: '.

How can I make such conversion in Ruby (not Rails)? My database is UTF8 and I still wanna store the accented characters, including kanjis, Chinese, etc., but just wanna replace the punctuation.

Solution

  • Found this gem that works exactly what I wanted - https://github.com/qwuen/punctuate

    Just do .punctuate!:

    irb(main):001:0> require 'punctuate'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> "Your résumé’s a non–encyclopædia".punctuate!
=> "Your résumé's a non-encyclopædia"