Babosa

Babosa is a library for creating human-friendly identifiers, aka "slugs". It 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.

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

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

Currently supported languages include:

• Bulgarian
• Danish
• German
• Greek
• Macedonian
• Norwegian
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Ukrainian

I'll gladly accept contributions from fluent speakers to support more languages.

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

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

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"

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

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

require "babosa"

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  friendly_id :name, use: :slugged

  def normalize_friendly_id(input)
    input.to_s.to_slug.normalize(transliterations: :russian).to_s
  end
end

Babosa goes out of its way to handle nasty Unicode issues you might never think you would have by checking, sanitizing and normalizing your string input.

It will automatically use whatever Unicode library you have loaded before Babosa, or fall back to a simple built-in library. Supported Unicode libraries include:

• Java (only on JRuby of course)
• Active Support
• Unicode
• Built-in

This built-in module is much faster than Active Support but much slower than Java or Unicode. It can only 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.

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 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

Some of Babosa's functionality was added to Active Support 3.0.0.

Babosa now 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, you may want to first take a look at Active Support's transliterate and parameterize to see if they suit your needs.

Babosa provides much of the functionality provided by the Stringex gem, but in the subjective opinion of the author, is for most use cases a better choice.

Stringex offers functionality for storing slugs in an Active Record model, like a simple version of FriendlyId, in addition to string processing. Babosa only does string processing.

Stringex uses an agressive Unicode to ASCII mapping which outputs gibberish for almost anything but Western European langages and Mandarin Chinese. Babosa supports only languages for which fluent speakers have provided transliterations, to ensure that the output makes sense to users.

Stringex does no Unicode normalization or validation before transliterating strings, so if you pass in strings with encoding errors or with different Unicode normalizations, you'll get unpredictable results.

Babosa avoids making assumptions about locales like Stringex does, so it doesn't offer transliterations like this out of the box:

"$12 worth of Ruby power".to_url => "12-dollars-worth-of-ruby-power"

This is because the symbol "$" is used in many Latin American countries for the peso. Stringex does this in many places, for example, transliterating all Han characters into Pinyin, effectively treating Japanese text as if it were Mandarin Chinese.

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

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 2.x, JRuby 1.7+, and Rubinius 2.x It's probably compatible with other Rubies as well.

Please use Babosa's Github issue tracker.

"Babosa" means slug in Spanish.

Norman Clarke

Many thanks to the following people for their help:

• anhkind - Vietnamese support
• Martins Zakis - Bug fixes
• Vassilis Rodokanakis - Greek support
• Peco Danajlovski - Macedonian support
• Philip Arndt - Bug fixes
• Jonas Forsberg - Swedish support
• Jaroslav Kalistsuk - Greek support
• Steven Heidel - Bug fixes
• Edgars Beigarts - Support for multiple transliterators
• 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

Copyright (c) 2010-2013 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.