Ruby utf8 to ansel converter

Hi I use a rails plugin that transforms ansel to utf8 by an addition to iconv. I am now looking for a solution to the other part of the problem, to convert utf8 to ansel

I have not found any railsplugin that solves that problem, but there are some Perl and C++ solutions. My question is now if one could convert utf8 to ansel by just exchanging all utf8 character codes to corresponding ansel codes using some ruby string function, although that would be a very ineffektiv solution, or is the problem more complex ?

Is there a better way to solve the problem in ruby ?

Which ruby function should be used considering that an utf8 character corresponds to multiple ansel characters ?

Anyone that knows any plugin or similar that could be used, as a part of the solution ?

Would appreciate any help