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.approximate_ascii.to_s #=> "Golcuk, Turkey"

Per-locale transliteration

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

Supported language currently include Danish, German, Serbian and Spanish. I'll gladly accept contributions and 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 add not only transliterations, but expansions for some characters if you want:

Babosa::Characters.add_approximations(:user, {
  "0" => "oh",
  "1" => "one",
  "2" => "two",
  "3" => "three",
  "." => " dot "
})
"Web 2.0".to_slug.normalize!(:transliterations => :user) #=> "web-two-dot-oh"

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.

Rails 3

Most of Babosa's functionality is already present in Active Support/Rails 3. Babosa exists primarily to support non-Rails applications, and Rails apps prior to 3.0. Most of the code here was originally written for FriendlyId. Several things, like tidy_bytes and ASCII transliteration, were later added to Rails and I18N.

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

Molte Emil Strange Andersen - Danish support
Milan Dobrota - Serbian support

Changelog

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

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.