On 1/13/06, Ezra Zygmuntowicz <ezmobius / gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>
> Thanks-
> -Ezra
>

I suspect you'll have to define the mapping yourself... the Unicode
characters U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK and U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE
QUOTATION MARK don't appear to have any defined Unicode
composition/decomposition mappings.

http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt for data,
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UCD.html#Decomposition_Mapping
for further detail

-A