title: smarter character replacement using ruby gsub and regexp
body: <p>I'm trying to create permalink like behavior for some article titles and i don't want to add a new db field for permalink. So i decided to write a helper that will convert my article title from:</p>
  
  <p>"<em>O "focoasă" a pornit cruciada, împotriva bărbaţilor zgârciţi</em>" to 
   "<em>o-focoasa-a-pornit-cruciada-impotriva-barbatilor-zgarciti</em>". </p>
  
  <p>While i figured out how to replace spaces with hyphens and remove other special characters (other than -) using: </p>
  
  <pre><code>title.gsub(/\s/, "-").gsub(/[^\w-]/, '').downcase
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am wondering if there is any other way to replace a character with a specific other character from only one .gsub method call, so I won't have to chain title.gsub("ă", "a") methods for all the UTF-8 special characters of my localization.</p>
  
  <p>I was thinking of building a hash with all the special characters and their counterparts but I haven't figured out yet how to use variables with regexps.</p>
  
  <p>What I was looking for is something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>title.gsub(/\s/, "-").gsub(*replace character goes here*).gsub(/[^\w-]/, '').downcase
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>