Sorting UTF-8 strings in RoR

Question

I am trying to figure out a \'proper\' way of sorting UTF-8 strings in Ruby on Rails.

In my application, I have a select box that is populated with countries. As my

Answer 1

There are a couple of ways to go. You may want to convert the UTF strings to hex strings and then sort them:

s.split(//).collect { |x| x.unpack('U').to_s }.join

or you may use the library iconv. Read up on it and use it as appropriate (from dzone):

#add this to environment.rb
#call to_iso on any UTF8 string to get a ISO string back
#example : "Cédez le passage aux français".to_iso

class String
  require 'iconv' #this line is not needed in rails !
  def to_iso
    Iconv.conv('ISO-8859-1', 'utf-8', self)
  end
end