i15r handles non-english source

08 January 2010

The other day thinking about how i15r could be improved I realized that there are times when the language of the non-internationalized site is not English (surprise, surprise). Add to this that lots of languages have "special" characters, characters that may not be properly found and replaced by the matchers. So I first learned the basics of how Ruby handles encodings (from James Edward Gray's excellent series) and then adjusted a few matchers to catch those special characters, too. (Note: one can't underestimate the utility of a spec suite that covers most of the code)

The specs pass but I am pretty certain there are some cases where the matchers might not be up to the task. If you come through such a case, please submit a bug report. Since there has been a huge improvement in string encoding in Ruby 1.9 (basically, strings now have an encoding as opposed to in Ruby 1.8), there might be some cases where strings are properly internationalized using Ruby 1.9 but not with 1.8.

So if you think this is a valuable addition or just have not tried i15r yet, go get it:

gem install i15r --source http://gemcutter.org