From: Josef 'Jupp' Schugt Date: 2003-03-13T07:08:45+09:00 Subject: [ANN] Periodic.rb version 0.2 - PSE as Ruby module Hi! At http://members.lycos.nl/jupp/linux/soft/ruby/Periodic.html you can now find version 0.2 of Periodic.rb. Periodic.rb is a Ruby module that provides information about all chemical elements as a single constant table named Periodic::Table. The database is taken from Gperiodic that is released under GPL. The character set used for the table is ISO 8859-1. Information that is not available is encoded as nil. Periodic::Table[0] provides descriptions of the table's columns (listed on the page), whereas Periodic::Table[1] through Periodic::Table[118] provide information about H (Hydrogen) through Uuo (Ununoctium) the index being the element's atomic number. New in version 0.2 is that Periodic.Table[n][0] has become a hash that contains the Element names in different languages. To select a certain language you need to provide the IS639 language code. Follows list of language codes supported in the most recent version: de (German) en (English) fr (French) Example: Periodic.Table[50][0]['de'] = 'Zinn' Periodic.Table[50][0]['en'] = 'Tin' Periodic.Table[50][0]['fr'] = 'Etain' French names of elements are spelled according according to Hachette: Dictionnaire pratique du fran�ais. German names of elements are spelled according to the by far most famous German book on Engineering, H�tte: Die Grundlagen der Ingenieurwissenschaften (note that in some cases the spelling used by scientists is not necessarily the one used by other people. As far as elements with atomic number above 100 are concerned I did make sure that the names of elements of atomic numbers greater than 100 are that proposed by the IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry). Josef 'Jupp' Schugt -- .---------------------. .------..---..-----..---..-----. | http://jupp.tux.nu/ | | jupp || @ || gmx || . || net | `---------------------' `------'`---'`-----'`---'`-----'