# Re curly quotes and forcing ascci **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [January 14, 2006, 1:59am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-curly-quotes-and-forcing-ascci/52439 "2006-01-14T01:59:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ezra\_z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/f07891/32.png) [@ezra\_z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ezra_z)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2006, 1:59am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-curly-quotes-and-forcing-ascci/52439/1 "2006-01-14T01:59:25Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![ezra\_z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/f07891/32.png) [@ezra\_z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ezra_z)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2006, 5:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-curly-quotes-and-forcing-ascci/52439/2 "2006-01-14T17:53:10Z")
Ezra Z. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) 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…) ---
**Author:** ![ezra\_z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/f07891/32.png) [@ezra\_z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ezra_z)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2006, 10:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-curly-quotes-and-forcing-ascci/52439/3 "2006-01-15T22:32:51Z")
On Jan 14, 2006, at 8:50 AM, Christian N. wrote: > > for each char? > > – > > Christian N. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) http:// > > [chneukirchen.org](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](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 ---
**Author:** ![ezra\_z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/f07891/32.png) [@ezra\_z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ezra_z)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2006, 5:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-curly-quotes-and-forcing-ascci/52439/4 "2006-01-18T17:05:42Z")
On 1/13/06, Ezra Z. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > -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](http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt) for data, [UCD Documentation File Replaced](http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UCD.html#Decomposition_Mapping) for further detail -A