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

Here's my suggestion using Iconv.

class String
  def remove_non_ascii
    require 'iconv'
    Iconv.conv('ASCII//IGNORE', 'UTF8', self)
  end
end