How to replace the Unicode gem on Ruby 1.9?

Question

Unfortunately, the Unicode 0.1 (sudo gem install unicode) doesn\'t work on Ruby 1.9. I have the following snippet:

require \"rubygems\"
require          


        

Answer 1

There is also I18n.transliterate('string') method in Rails. Works like a charm.

Answer 2

Update: a better option may be to use the gem unicode_utils that was created specifically for these missing features:

require "unicode_utils"
UnicodeUtils.nfkd("áéíóúç").gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/,'').to_s
#=> "aeiouc"

---

Is there a possibility you can depend on Rails' ActiveSupport? Then you can do the following:

require "activesupport"
mb_str = ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars.new("áéíóúç")
mb_str.normalize(:kd).gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/,'').to_s
#=> "aeiouc"

ActiveSupport::Multibyte was written to bring UTF-8/Unicode support to Ruby 1.8, but works fine in 1.9 too. You may be able to borrow some of the code if you don't want it as an external dependency.