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

class String
 def remove_non_ascii(replacement="") 
   self.gsub(/[\u0080-\u00ff]/, replacement)
 end
end