smarter character replacement using ruby gsub and regexp

Question

Hi guys!

I'm trying to create permalink like behavior for some article titles and i don't want to add a new db field for permalink. So i decided to write a helper that will convert my article title from:

"O "focoasă" a pornit cruciada, împotriva bărbaţilor zgârciţi" to "o-focoasa-a-pornit-cruciada-impotriva-barbatilor-zgarciti".

While i figured out how to replace spaces with hyphens and remove other special characters (other than -) using:

title.gsub(/\s/, "-").gsub(/[^\w-]/, '').downcase

I am wondering if there is any other way to replace a character with a specific other character from only one .gsub method call, so I won't have to chain title.gsub("ă", "a") methods for all the UTF-8 special characters of my localization.

I was thinking of building a hash with all the special characters and their counterparts but I haven't figured out yet how to use variables with regexps.

What I was looking for is something like:

title.gsub(/\s/, "-").gsub(*replace character goes here*).gsub(/[^\w-]/, '').downcase

Thanks!

Answer 1

I solved this in my application by using the Unidecoder gem:

require 'unidecode'

def uninternationalize(str)
  Unidecoder.decode(str).gsub("[?]", "").gsub(/`/, "'").strip
end