smarter character replacement using ruby gsub and regexp

Posted by agriciuc on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by agriciuc
Published on 2010-04-20T19:50:49Z Indexed on 2010/04/20 19:53 UTC
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Hi guys!

I'm trying to create permalink like behavior for some article titles and i don't want to add a new db field for permalink. So i decided to write a helper that will convert my article title from:

"O "focoasa" a pornit cruciada, împotriva barbatilor zgârciti" to "o-focoasa-a-pornit-cruciada-impotriva-barbatilor-zgarciti".

While i figured out how to replace spaces with hyphens and remove other special characters (other than -) using:

title.gsub(/\s/, "-").gsub(/[^\w-]/, '').downcase

I am wondering if there is any other way to replace a character with a specific other character from only one .gsub method call, so I won't have to chain title.gsub("a", "a") methods for all the UTF-8 special characters of my localization.

I was thinking of building a hash with all the special characters and their counterparts but I haven't figured out yet how to use variables with regexps.

What I was looking for is something like:

title.gsub(/\s/, "-").gsub(*replace character goes here*).gsub(/[^\w-]/, '').downcase

Thanks!

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