How to get rid of non-ascii characters in ruby

Question

I have a Ruby CGI (not rails) that picks photos and captions from a web form. My users are very keen on using smart quotes and ligatures, they are pasting from other sources

Answer 1

Use String#encode

The official way to convert between string encodings as of Ruby 1.9 is to use String#encode.

To simply remove non-ASCII characters, you could do this:

some_ascii   = "abc"
some_unicode = "áëëçüñżλφθΩ