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
• Hindi
• Macedonian
• Norwegian
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Additionally there are generic transliterators for transliterating from the Cyrillic alphabet and Latin alphabet with diacritics. The Latin transliterator can be used, for example, with Czech. There is also a transliterator named "Hindi" which may be sufficient for other Indic languages using Devanagari, but I do not know enough to say whether the transliterations would make sense.

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 normalizes all input strings to NFC.

Babosa can 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(allow_bangs: false) #=> uber_cool_stuff

You can add custom transliterators for your language with very little code. For example here's the transliterator for German:

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):

require "spec_helper"

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.

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.

Please use Babosa's Github issue tracker.

"Babosa" means "slug" in Spanish.

• Philip Arndt
• Norman Clarke

Many thanks to the following people for their help:

• Dmitry A. Ilyashevich - Deprecation fixes
• 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
• Norman Clarke - Original author

Copyright (c) 2010-2021 Norman Clarke and contributors

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.

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