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

Quick GS revealed this discussion which suggests the following method:

class String
  def remove_nonascii(replacement)
    n=self.split("")
    self.slice!(0..self.size)
    n.each { |b|
     if b[0].to_i< 33 || b[0].to_i>127 then
       self.concat(replacement)
     else
       self.concat(b)
     end
    }
    self.to_s
  end
end