Charazard

Cleans up bad character encodings with liberal application of fire.

Usage

Converting Windows-1252 (ISO 8859-1) to UTF-8

CSV files saved by Excel on Windows are by default encoded in Windows-1252 (which is close to but not quite ISO 8859-1 or ISO Latin 1). Charazard.fix_invalid_unicode_literals can be used to convert these characters into valid UTF-8 without breaking existing UTF-8 strings.

Charazard.fix_invalid_unicode_literals("\x93Smart quotes\x94 \xC3\x9Cber Unicode")
  # => "“Smart quotes” Über Unicode"

Charazard.fix_invalid_unicode_literals can be used in combination with filter_io to filter CSV streams. Since this is such a common use case, Charazard includes a handy helper class:

require 'charazard/io'
require 'csv'

File.open(filename, external_encoding: 'UTF-8') do |io|
  io = Charazard::IO.new(io)
  CSV.parse(io, row_sep: "\n") do |row|
    p row
  end
end

Converting HTML to plain text

Feeds (RSS, product lists, etc.) often contain HTML which you may want to sanitize into plain text. Charazard recognises basic formatting such as paragraphs and lists.

<p>First sentence.</p><p>Second sentenence.</p>
<ul><li>foo</li><li>bar</li></ul>

text = Charazard.html_to_plain(html)

First sentence.
Second sentenence.
* foo
* bar