# Announcing the HerbGobbler: Automatic English Text Extraction from Ruby on Rails Views

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/announcing-the-herbgobbler-automatic-english-text-extraction-from-ruby-on-rails-views/202056>\
**Category:** Rails I18n\
**Created:** [January 20, 2011, 6:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/announcing-the-herbgobbler-automatic-english-text-extraction-from-ruby-on-rails-views/202056 "2011-01-20T18:25:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![luislavena](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/0ea827/32.png) [@luislavena](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/luislavena)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2011, 6:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/announcing-the-herbgobbler-automatic-english-text-extraction-from-ruby-on-rails-views/202056/1 "2011-01-20T18:25:53Z")

</div>

Hey Everyone,

I just wanted to announce the release of my open source english text  
extraction tool for Ruby On Rails, the (h)erbgobbler. The  
HerbGobbler is used to take a non-localized Rails project and convert  
the views into localized versions of those views. It does this  
through the following steps:

1. It is meant to be run on a totally non-localized code base (empty  
en.yml)
2. It parses all of your erb files under app/views
3. It finds all of the english text (combining for full sentences)  
and extracts that text into config/locales/en.yml
4. It replaces the english that it found with \<%= t “.key” %\> calls

More information can be found here: [http://www.i18n-rails.com/](http://www.i18n-rails.com/)

If you aren’t using the default rails i18n mechanism, details on how  
to customize the HerbGobbler to store the extracted text into your  
datastore can be found on the git-hub page:  
[GitHub - douglasjsellers/herbgobbler: Tool for Text Extraction from erb/rhtml files for internationalization (i18n) purposes](https://github.com/douglasjsellers/herbgobbler).

The one caveat with the HerbGobbler is that it will not get you to a  
100% localization of your ERB, it ignores javascript blocks on pages  
at this point. In Javascript it turns out to be very hard to  
distinguish between text meant to just be code (like class names) and  
text meant to be text. So you typically only get about 95%  
localization through running the HerbGobbler.

This project is very much still in beta and should be tread as such.  
Please report any bugs directly on the github page.

Thanks,

Douglas