title: What is the best way to replace smart quotes, smart apostrophe and ellipsis in Rails 3?
body: <p>My application allows the user to enter text. When they copy and paste from MS Word, it pastes smart quotes, smart apostrophes and ellipsis. These characters get saved into the database and cause problems. What is the best way to replace these non-UTF-8 characters with normal quotes("), apostrophe(') and periods(...)?</p>
  
  <p>Also, how do you test this functionality? I added a test with these special characters and <code># encoding: ISO-8859-1</code> at the top of the file. The special characters caused the tests stop running: <code>/home/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/redgreen-1.2.2/lib/redgreen.rb:62:in 'sub': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError)</code>...Apparently redgreen gem is incompatible with these characters...?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>