Question

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Transliteration in ruby

I am searching for a simple way to convert strings like these:

• “spaß” to “spass”
• “über” to “ueber”
• etc.

This is needed for generating valid usernames from names of people.

Answer 1

This is called transliteration. An approximation of this (see examples) can be performed using the Iconv class.

Try one of the following (require ‘iconv’ first):

Iconv.iconv('ascii//ignore//translit', 'utf-8', string).to_s
Iconv.iconv('ascii//translit', 'utf-8', string).to_s

irb(main):013:0> Iconv.iconv('ascii//translit', 'utf-8', 'spaß').to_s
=> "spass"
irb(main):014:0> Iconv.iconv('ascii//translit', 'utf-8', 'crêpes').to_s
=> "crepes"
irb(main):017:0> Iconv.iconv('ascii//translit', 'utf-8', 'über').to_s
=> "uber"

There’s also an iconv command line utility. More information on that and some Ruby examples (search for ‘ruby’) here.

An alternative to this is Unidecode, which I guess was inspired by the original Perl implementation. I haven’t used it in its Ruby incarnation, but it should do multi-char expansions (which apparently you want) better.

Finally, if you’re running Rails, you may find this thread interesting. It details some differences between alternative approaches to transliteration, and shows a way to do this within the Rails core (ActiveSupport::Inflector.transliterate)