On Jan 14, 2006, at 8:50 AM, Christian Neukirchen wrote: > Ezra Zygmuntowicz <ezmobius / gmail.com> writes: > >> Listers- >> >> I'm doing some text munging for the obituaries to go online at >> the newspaper i work for. I have a simple question. Is there >> a way to convert some text to plain ascii? i mean the text I >> am processing has curly quotes and a few other rich text >> chars in it. Is there a pure ruby way of converting these >> chars into their plain ascii counterparts short of a regex >> for each char? > > What format is the text in? Could you maybe post a snippet, if > possible? > > (And, btw, can you tell me the URL of that newspaper. I'm very > interested in putting obituraries online, since that is basically the > only reason our local newspaper gets read at all...) > >> Thanks- >> -Ezra > -- > Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen / gmail.com> http:// > chneukirchen.org > Christian- I won't be in the office until tuesday but I will post a sample then. The url of the newspaper is http://yakimaherald.com . The whole site runs on rails. And I have a ton of ruby code that ties together the different departments as well. Lots of text processing between classified/newsroom/web. Also our entire intranet runs on ruby. Circulation/accounting/prepress/surveys and employee reviews. Obituaries are a big traffic draw to our web site as well. Thats why we are working on a better system. Right now the obits don't make it online until the day after they are in the paper and thats not right. So instead of letting the obits make their way through the newsroom database system, I am going to bypass it and send it straight to the web instead. The format of the text is from an MacOS9 machine so it has \r for line endings and uses curly quotes and a few other chars that don't translate well to being displayed on the web. The database that i pull them out of is an old proprietary BaseView db and the company is not very forthcoming in helping us use the system in ways they didn't envision already. Cheers- -Ezra