I have an Unicode string and need to translate it into pure ASCII.

t = "xf0x9dx97x94xf0x9dx98x82xf0x9dx97xb4xf0x9dx98x82xf0x9dx98x80xf0x9dx98x81"

My first try was unsuccessful:

t.encode('ASCII', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: '')
=> ""

Translated the string using unicode normalization:

t.unicode_normalize :nfkd
=> "August"

Is there a better solution? It should be gem-independent and work with Ruby 2.x (String#unicode_normalize is unavailable on 2.1 and earlier versions).