For some reason I’m yet discern, I’m irrationally annoyed by “smart quotes”, the non-ASCII single and double quotes imposed on our databases by windows users.

There’s no real reason to hate them, but I do. Maybe it’s the extra few bytes they consume when encoded as UTF-8, or maybe it’s the way they get converted to numeric entities in my XML exports. In any case, this ActiveRecord plugin makes the following changes to your model attributes before validation:

U+2018 (‘) -> '
U+2019 (’) -> '
U+02BC (ʼ) -> '
U+201C (“) -> "
U+201D (”) -> "
U+02EE (ˮ) -> "

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  dumb_quotes!
end

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  dumb_quotes!, :except => :title
end

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  dumb_quotes!, :only => :description
end

Option 1. Load the plugin as a gem

gem install dumb_quotes
add "config.gem 'dumb_quotes'" to your environment.rb

Option 2. Use the standard Rails plugin install (assuming Rails 2.1).

./script/plugin install git://github.com/yob/dumb_quotes.git

The translation is done with raw bytes. If you happen to be using anything other than UTF-8 in your models, you’re likely to munge data.

This also means it’s almost certainly not ruby 1.9 compatible. Patches welcome.

This plugin is essentially a fork of the strip attributes plugin, released under the MIT License by Ryan McGeary.

github.com/rmm5t/strip_attributes

Copyright © 2007-2008 Ryan McGeary released under the MIT license Copyright © 2009 James Healy released under the MIT license

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License