From: Mike Meng <meng.yan@...>
Date: 2005-12-03T14:42:31+09:00
Subject: Encounter troubles with Regex in Chinese text splitting

Hi All,
  I'm a Ruby newbie. I'm writting a program to process a big chunk of
Chinese text. The first step is to split the chunk of text into a list
of sentences. In Chinese, all the characters are listed one by one
without any natural boundary tag like space in English. Sentences are
separated by one of three special characters(。？！). So at the
first glance, I thought it's a simple task:

# $chunk stores the text body
$sentenses = $chunk.split(/。|？|！/)
# now $sentenses holds the list of sentences.

  By when I checked the result, I found some of the sentenses didn't
split well. For instance, here is a sentense:
"你没病，他呢？" (means "You are not sick, how about him?") . In
GB2312, "病，" is encoded to (hex) b2a1 a3ac, and "。" happens to be
encoded to (hex) a1a3. So the String#split method finds there is a
"。" in the middle of the sentense and incorrectly do the splitting.

  Certainly this is because the String#split (and the Ruby regex
engine) is byte-oriented instead of true character-oriented, and it's a
frequent problem in i18n domain. Is there any ways in Ruby to correct
split Chinese text? 

  Thanks in advance.

  myan