tamsuiboy / babosa

A library for creating slugs. Babosa is an extraction and improvement of the string code from FriendlyId, intended to help developers create similar libraries or plugins.

Babosa

Babosa is a library for creating human-friendly identifiers. Its primary intended purpose is for creating URL slugs, but can also be useful for normalizing and sanitizing data.

It is an extraction and improvement of the string code from FriendlyId. I have released this as a separate library to help developers who want to create libraries similar to FriendlyId.

Features / Usage

ASCII transliteration

"Gölcük, Turkey".to_slug.transliterate.to_s #=> "Golcuk, Turkey"

Per-locale transliteration

"Jürgen Müller".to_slug.transliterate.to_s           #=> "Jurgen Muller"
"Jürgen Müller".to_slug.transliterate(:german).to_s  #=> "Juergen Mueller"

Many European languages using both Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are supported. I'll gladly accept contributions from fluent speakers to support more languages.

Non-ASCII removal

"Gölcük, Turkey".to_slug.to_ascii.to_s #=> "Glck, Turkey"

Truncate by characters

"üüü".to_slug.truncate(2).to_s #=> "üü"

Truncate by bytes

This can be useful to ensure the generated slug will fit in a database column whose length is limited by bytes rather than UTF-8 characters.

"üüü".to_slug.truncate_bytes(2).to_s #=> "ü"

Remove punctuation chars

"this is, um, **really** cool, huh?".to_slug.word_chars.to_s #=> "this is um really cool huh"

All-in-one

"Gölcük, Turkey".to_slug.normalize.to_s #=> "golcuk-turkey"

Other stuff

Babosa can also generate strings for Ruby method names. (Yes, Ruby 1.9 can use UTF-8 chars in method names, but you may not want to):

"this is a method".to_slug.to_ruby_method! #=> this_is_a_method
"über cool stuff!".to_slug.to_ruby_method! #=> uber_cool_stuff!

# You can also disallow trailing punctuation chars
"über cool stuff!".to_slug.to_ruby_method(false) #=> uber_cool_stuff

You can easily add custom transliterators for your language with very little code, for example here's the transliterator for German:

# encoding: utf-8
module Babosa
  module Transliterator
    class German < Latin
      APPROXIMATIONS = {
        "ä" => "ae",
        "ö" => "oe",
        "ü" => "ue",
        "Ä" => "Ae",
        "Ö" => "Oe",
        "Ü" => "Ue"
      }
    end
  end
end

And a spec (you can use this as a template):

# encoding: utf-8
require File.expand_path("../../spec_helper", __FILE__)

describe Babosa::Transliterator::German do

  let(:t) { described_class.instance }
  it_behaves_like "a latin transliterator"

  it "should transliterate Eszett" do
    t.transliterate("ß").should eql("ss")
  end

  it "should transliterate vowels with umlauts" do
    t.transliterate("üöä").should eql("ueoeae")
  end

end

UTF-8 support

Babosa has no hard dependencies, but if you have either the Unicode or ActiveSupport gems installed and required prior to requiring "babosa", these will be used to perform upcasing and downcasing on UTF-8 strings. On JRuby 1.5 and above, Java's native Unicode support will be used instead. Unless you're on JRuby, which already has excellent support for Unicode via Java's Standard Library, I recommend using the Unicode gem because it's the fastest Ruby Unicode library available.

If none of these libraries are available, Babosa falls back to a simple module which only supports Latin characters.

This default module is fast and can do very naive Unicode composition to ensure that, for example, "é" will always be composed to a single codepoint rather than an "e" and a "´" - making it safe to use as a hash key. But seriously - save yourself the headache and install a real Unicode library.

If you are using Babosa with a language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, Babosa requires either Unicode, Active Support or Java.

Rails 3

Some of Babosa's functionality is already present in Active Support/Rails 3.

Babosa differs from ActiveSupport primarily in that it supports non-Latin strings by default, and has per-locale ASCII transliterations already baked-in. If you are considering using Babosa with Rails 3, you should first take a look at Active Support's transliterate and parameterize because it may already do what you need.

More info

Please see the API docs and source code for more info.

Getting it

Babosa can be installed via Rubygems:

gem install babosa

You can get the source code from its Github repository.

Babosa is tested to be compatible with Ruby 1.8.6-1.9.2, JRuby 1.4-1.5, and Rubinius 1.0.x. It's probably compatible with other Rubies as well.

Reporting bugs

Please use Babosa's Github issue tracker.

Misc

"Babosa" means slug in Spanish.

Author

Norman Clarke

Contributors

• Tiberiu C. Turbureanu - Romanian support
• Kim Joar Bekkelund - Norwegian support
• Alexey Shkolnikov - Russian support
• Martin Petrov - Bulgarian support
• Molte Emil Strange Andersen - Danish support
• Milan Dobrota - Serbian support

Changelog

• 0.3.5 - Don't strip underscores from identifiers.
• 0.3.4 - Add Romanian support.
• 0.3.3 - Add Norwegian support.
• 0.3.2 - Improve Macedonian support.
• 0.3.1 - Small fixes to Cyrillic.
• 0.3.0 - Cyrillic support. Improve support for various Unicode spaces and dashes.
• 0.2.2 - Fix for "smart" quote handling.
• 0.2.1 - Implement #empty? for compatiblity with Active Support's #blank?.
• 0.2.0 - Added support for Danish. Added method to generate Ruby identifiers. Improved performance.
• 0.1.1 - Added support for Serbian.
• 0.1.0 - Initial extraction from FriendlyId.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010-2011 Norman Clarke

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.