Rails: CLEAN special characters from English or Arabic String

Question

I want to clean special characters from English or Arabic Strings. For example, the "–" in the below example is a special character that displays a "?" when converted to UTF-8.

File name: 1-Mechanical Drawings – Part 1 should be like 1-Mechanical Drawings Part 1.

السلطات العراقية تعلنé should be السلطات العراقية تعلن, where é is special character and should be removed from the string.

Could you be more specific about how you're defining a special character? What makes `é` and `—` special? — georgebrock, Sep 10 '12 at 07:38
sure. I need to clean the file names before uploading. I'm using transliterate_file_name of the paper-clip. its working fine. the problem is when I run the following gsub to clean the file name. it cleans well but it doesn't clean the special characters. "1-Mechanical Drawings – Part 1 should be like 1-Mechanical Drawings Part 1".squeeze(" ").gsub(' ', '_').gsub(/\W/,'').downcase my app is supporting file names in different languages — kashif, Sep 10 '12 at 09:52
Please check http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1268289/how-to-get-rid-of-non-ascii-characters-in-ruby — Arunmohan PK, Sep 10 '12 at 11:28
I tried the above mentioned approach. with special characters, it also cleans the Arabic characters as well. — kashif, Sep 11 '12 at 05:22

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 16 '12 at 21:06

This is reinventing the wheel somewhat, but you can do something like this to get the output you say you want in the question:

def clean_file name
  result = File.basename(name,".*")
  result.gsub!(/[é–]\s?/,'')
  result
end

Replacing the bit within [] with the characters you feel are not appropriate in file names like é etc. But beware two things:

Using a blacklist approach as above may mean you leave characters you don't want - it's more normal to use a whitelist approach like \W to catch all non-word characters, that works in ruby 1.9 at least, but perhaps is what causes you problems on 1.8
Leaving spaces in the names could cause you issues, so you should probably remove " " and downcase at least.

Rails: CLEAN special characters from English or Arabic String

1 Answers1