Ruby method to remove accents from UTF-8 international characters

Question

I am trying to create a \'normalized\' copy of a string, to help reduce duplicate names in a database. The names contain many international characters (ie. accented letters)

Answer 1

The parameterize method could be a nice and simple solution to remove special characters in order to use the string as human readable identifier:

> "Françoise Isaïe".parameterize
=> "francoise-isaie"