From: Paul Duncan <pabs@...>
Date: 2007-02-14T04:21:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Non-English characters

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* Thiago Arrais (thiago.arrais@gmail.com) wrote:
> Has anyone seen a non-english characters library for Ruby walking
> around? For now, I need to remove letter decorators (in other words,
> '=F1' becomes n and '=E2' becomes a) and drop non-alphanumeric
> characters ('!etter' becomes 'etter').

I thought iconv transliteration might do this, but it doesn't:

  require 'iconv'
  i =3D Iconv.new('ascii//TRANSLIT//IGNORE, 'iso-8859-1')
  i.iconv('=F1')
  =3D> "?"

A bit of googling turns up the following:

* Text::Unaccent, a Perl module available via CPAN
  (http://search.cpan.org/~ldachary/Text-Unaccent-1.08/Unaccent.pm)
* unac, a GNU utility (and library) that removes accents from
  characters. (http://home.gna.org/unac/unac-man3.en.html)

Both work roughly the same way; they use iconv to convert the source
string to UTF-16BE, followed by a mapping table to map accented
characters to their non-accented equivalents.
 =20
The unac link above has a bit more information about how these mapping
tables are generated; basically they have a script that parses a unicode
data file at build time and generates the mapping table.

The mapping table is available here:
  http://www.unicode.org/Public/3.2-Update/UnicodeData-3.2.0.txt

So anyway, the answers to your question appears to be: =20

* If you're just converting a couple of characters one time, just=20
  use a regular expression.
* If you're looking to convert an arbitrary number of characters one
  time and have access to a machine with GNU tools, just use unac.
* If you're not particular about the language, use the Perl library.
* If you don't mind installing the unac library, I wrote a quick wrapper
  for it.  See below for more.

This has been discussed on ruby-talk before:

  http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/96626

I wrote a quick binding for the unac library, you can grab it from here:

  http://pablotron.org/files/unac-ruby-0.1.0.tar.gz (tarball)
  http://pablotron.org/files/unac-ruby-0.1.0.tar.gz.asc (PGP Signature)
  http://hg.pablotron.org/unac-ruby (Mercurial Repository)

If you're interested, I can probably write a pure-Ruby version
relatively quickly too.

> Those are some pretty simple functions that I could write myself
> (actually I already have), but it would be nice to use some better
> tested code.
>=20
> Cheers,
>=20
> Thiago Arrais

--=20
Paul Duncan <pabs@pablotron.org>        pabs in #ruby-lang (OPN IRC)
http://www.pablotron.org/               OpenPGP Key ID: 0x82C29562

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