# Adding i18n support to Rails' transliterator **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails I18n\ **Created:** [April 14, 2010, 10:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/adding-i18n-support-to-rails-transliterator/186957 "2010-04-14T22:46:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/c67d28/32.png) [@Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Norman_Clarke)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 10:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/adding-i18n-support-to-rails-transliterator/186957/1 "2010-04-14T22:46:37Z")
Hi all, The other day I sent a patch to Rails to improve ActiveSupport::Inflector’s support for transliterating UTF-8 Latin characters to ASCII. In the discussion of the patch, I mentioned the idea of making Inflector.transliterate use Rails’ i18n facilities, and Jeremy K. and Yaroslav Markin encouraged me to pursue the idea. [http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/dceef0828a23e8298dd9a9aab1a33c49e84f17d6#activesupport/lib/active\_support/inflector/transliterate.rb-P50](http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/dceef0828a23e8298dd9a9aab1a33c49e84f17d6#activesupport/lib/active_support/inflector/transliterate.rb-P50) I’ve been working on support for this and would like to ask for some feedback before sending a patch to Rails. My work can be found at: [http://github.com/norman/rails/tree/translit](http://github.com/norman/rails/tree/translit) Basically the new code lets you do things like this: ``` I18n.backend.store_translations(:de, :support => ``` {:transliterations =\> {“ü” =\> “ue”, “ö” =\> “oe”}}) assert\_equal “Juergen Koehler”, ActiveSupport::Inflector.transliterate(“Jürgen Köhler”) Yaroslav, if you look in the tests you’ll see I also basically stole your Russian transliterator verbatim. 🙂 One of my main concerns has been keeping reasonably good performance in a thread-safe manner. The new code memoizes the available transliterators in a class variable, which I’m a little hesitant about doing, but I think will be ok. If someone more experienced with thread-safety issues could advise me on that I’d be grateful. Regards, Norman ---
**Author:** ![Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/c67d28/32.png) [@Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Norman_Clarke)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 12:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/adding-i18n-support-to-rails-transliterator/186957/2 "2010-04-15T00:34:20Z")
Hi Norman, great work! As just said on rails-core, I’d like to see this functionality in I18n if you were cool with that. I wouldn’t be too concerned about performance for starters but rather pluggability/extensibility. Figure out a good api and hook in a simple, initial implementation that works for most cases. I would guess your’s does. As long as people can plug in their own implementation and improvements while Rails still ships with a basic but stable version everybody will be happy 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/c67d28/32.png) [@Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Norman_Clarke)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 4:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/adding-i18n-support-to-rails-transliterator/186957/3 "2010-04-15T16:59:00Z")
Oh yeah, this would be really great. I am just facing a problem where this feature comes very very very handy 😉 So great to see someone has already worked on it! Max ---
**Author:** ![Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/c67d28/32.png) [@Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Norman_Clarke)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 5:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/adding-i18n-support-to-rails-transliterator/186957/4 "2010-04-15T17:51:41Z")
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 19:32, Sven F. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > As just said on rails-core, I’d like to see this functionality in I18n if you were cool with that. > > I wouldn’t be too concerned about performance for starters but rather pluggability/extensibility. Figure out a good api and hook in a simple, initial implementation that works for most cases. I would guess your’s does. As long as people can plug in their own implementation and improvements while Rails still ships with a basic but stable version everybody will be happy 🙂 Sounds good. I’ll work first on a patch for i18n then, and once there’s something decent in place I’ll patch it into Rails. That should allow the changes to Rails to be very small. I’ll be working on it in a fork on Github today. ---
**Author:** ![Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/c67d28/32.png) [@Norman\_Clarke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Norman_Clarke)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 6:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/adding-i18n-support-to-rails-transliterator/186957/5 "2010-04-15T18:30:20Z")
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 19:32, Sven F. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > As just said on rails-core, I’d like to see this functionality in I18n if you were cool with that. On more thing. An important assumption for my code is that the string be valid, composed UTF-8. This isn’t a problem with Rails because I can rely on ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars #normalize and #tidy\_bytes to prepare the string before passing it off to i18n for transliteration. However, people using i18n outside of Rails may have problems if their strings contain UTF-8 with combining characters. Do you think it’s ok to just document the issue and leave it up to users to resolve in their own code?