Byk

Ruby gem for fast transliteration of Serbian Cyrillic into Latin
_{Inspired by @dejan's nice little gem, this one comes with a C-optimized twist}

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "byk"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install byk

Usage

First, make sure to require the gem in your initializer:

require "byk"

This will extend String with a couple of simple methods:

"Шеширџија".to_latin         # => "Šeširdžija"
"Шеширџија".to_ascii_latin   # => "Sesirdzija"
"Šeširdžija".to_ascii_latin  # => "Sesirdzija"

There's also a destructive variant of each:

text = "Жвазбука"
text.to_latin!        # => "Žvazbuka"
text                  # => "Žvazbuka"
text.to_ascii_latin!  # => "Zvazbuka"
text                  # => "Zvazbuka"

Note that these methods take into account the two-letter capitalization rules:

"ЉИЉА Љиљановић".to_latin        # => "LJILJA Ljiljanović"
"ĐORĐE Đorđević".to_ascii_latin  # => "DJORDJE Djordjevic"

How fast is fast?

About 7-8x faster than the baseline Ruby implementation on my hardware. YMMV of course.

Raison d'être

This kind of speed-up might be worthwhile for massive localization projects, e.g. sites supporting dual script content. Remember, Benchmark is your friend.

I found transliteration to be a straightforward little problem that lends itself well to optimization. It also gave me an excuse to play with Ruby extensions, so there :smile_cat:

Compatibility

Byk is supported under MRI Ruby >= 1.9.2. I don't plan to support 1.8.7 or older due to substantial C API changes between 1.8 and 1.9. It doesn't build under Rubinius currently, but I intend to support it in future releases.

License

This gem is released under the MIT License.

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