Question

I’m trying to find a way to normalize a string to pass it as a filename.

I have this so far:

my_string.mb_chars.normalize(:kd).gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/n, '').downcase.gsub(/[^a-z]/, '_')

But first problem: the – character. I guess there is more problems with this method.

I don’t control the name, the name string can have accents, white spaces and special chars. I want to remove all of them, replace the accents with the corresponding letter (‘é’ => ‘e’) and replace the rest with the ‘_’ character.

The names are like:

• “Prélèvements – Routine”
• “Carnet de santé”
• …

I want them to be like a filename with no space/special chars:

• “prelevements_routine”
• “carnet_de_sante”
• …

Thanks for the help 🙂

Answer 1

Take a look at ActiveSupport::Inflector.transliterate, it’s very useful handling this kind of chars problems. Read there: ActiveSupport::Inflector

Then, you could do something like:

ActiveSupport::Inflector.transliterate my_string.downcase.gsub(/\s/,"_")