Dumb Quotes
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 (Examples
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
Installation
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
Caveats
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.
Credits
This plugin is essentially a fork of the strip attributes plugin, released under the MIT License by Ryan McGeary.
github.com/rmm5t/strip_attributes
License
Copyright © 2007-2008 Ryan McGeary released under the MIT license Copyright © 2009 James Healy released under the MIT license