From: Michal Suchanek Date: 2006-01-25T03:06:47+09:00 Subject: Re: [ANN] ICU4R 0.1.0 - initial release On 1/19/06, Lugovoi Nikolai wrote:> ==ICU4R v.0.1.0 - initial release ==>> = Abstract>> ICU4R is an attempt to provide better Unicode support for Ruby, based> on ICU library.What are we missing in Ruby now? > = Features>> ICU4R is Ruby C-extension binding for ICU library.> It is NOT mirroring full ICU object hierarchy, but is rather set of simple> interfaces for some practically useful functionality, and provides:>> - UString : String-like class with internal UTF16 storage;What is that cool about UTF16? You still can get multiword charactresbut the encoding is no longer byte-order independent.> - UCA rules for UString comparisons (<=>, casecmp);> - Unicode regular expressions;I guess we do not have this in Ruby yet but I never tried :)> - encoding(codepage) conversion;I thought this is there somewhere - some iconv thingy or something.> - Unicode normalization;> - access to resource bundles, including ICU locale data;> - transliteration, also rule-based;Wow, does this mean I could read Russian in Latin characters? That wayI could probably understand about half of it :) >> Bunch of locale-sensitive functions:> - upcase/downcase;> - string collation;> - string search;> - iterators over text line/word/char/sentence breaks;> - message formatting (number/currency/string/time);> - date and number parsing. I suspect there are poeple who use this - I only recently switched toen_US.UTF-8 locale from C so that I can read some funny charaters andstill enjoy interfaces not clobbered by translation :) It looks like some features can be useful. I should try it when I getto something that needs some of those funny characters. Thanks Michal -- Support the freedom of music!Maybe it's a weird genre .. but weird is *not* illegal.Maybe next time they will send a special forces commandoto your picnic .. because they think you are weird. www.music-versus-guns.org http://en.policejnistat.cz