When I write web apps I try my best to keep my urls clean and legible. One thing that has always troubled me is how to handle label creation of named things web users key into the app. For example if a user enters a name of a restaurant Alicanté Café the uri safe for of that (if there is no intervention) ‘Alicant%C3%A9%20Caf%C3%A9’, which is total gobblygoo and one might as well show a uid or something of that nature since at least that doesn’t physically hurt the eye. As someone who has worked on a lot of Restaurant related apps this has always been something I wanted there to be an easy solution to. This weekend I decided it was worth trying once again to see what would work best. And after reading the “Internationalization in Ruby” in The Ruby Way. Here is the super simple trick
require 'iconv'
strange_name = "Alicanté Café"
converter = Iconv.new('ASCII//TRANSLIT', 'UTF-8')
converter.iconv(strange_name)
"Alicant'e Caf'e"
It leaves some odd ’ and “sfor some reason but they will get stripped away with all the other potential weird stuff out (”,’,etc). Still this discovery makes me stop complaining about pretentious foreign sounding restaurant names.
July 14th, 2008 at 03:25 AM Yes! This is what I did for the label generator at work. I don't think the process actually strips the accents but instead separates them from the letter and that's why you end up with the floating '.