Stripping International Characters

require "unicode" 

def strip_international_characters(utf8_string)
  Unicode.normalize_KD(utf8_string).gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/n, "")
end

strip_international_characters("Smörgåsbord") => "Smorgasbord"

Slugs ‘R Us

When is this useful? For slugs of course! Take a look at Slugalizer.

Alternate Way

It is possible to use the Iconv library too, like below, but it only seems to work on BSD systems (and not Linux systems).

require "iconv" 

Iconv.new("ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT", "UTF-8").iconv(text)