If you import data from confused sources you may end up with HTMLish entites littering your model data. I’m looking at you ®

If you don’t want them, then replace them with the appropriate UTF-8 character before they make it into your database.

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  replace_entities!
end

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

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

1. On rails 2.3

* gem install strip_control_chars
* add the following to your environment.rb

  config.gem 'replace_entities', version => "<2.0"

1. On rails 3

* gem install strip_control_chars
* add the following to your Gemfile

  gem 'replace_entities', ">=2.0"

On rails 2.x you must use version 1.x of this gem. On rails 3.x you must use version 2.x of this gem.

The entities are replaced with UTF-8 characters. If you’re not expecting UTF-8 data, you may end up with invalid strings.

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 © 2010 James Healy released under the MIT license

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License