Simple I18n Inflector for Rails

i18n-inflector-rails version 1.0 (Rain)

Summary

This Rails plug-in contains bindings for the I18n Inflector module for Ruby’s I18n. It overwrites the translate() method from Rails in a way that it will interpolate additional inflection tokens present in translations. These tokens may appear in patterns which are contained within @{ and } symbols.

Why?

It’s intended to be used in a projects where tranlations are performed by many people, yet there is a need to inflect sentences or words by user’s gender, person or other data.

To achieve similar functionality lambdas can be used but including Proc objects in translations may be considered unsafe.

If you have a troop of happy translators that shouldn’t have the ability to execute any code yet you need some simple inflection then this plug-in might help you.

Synopsis

translate('.welcome')
In a YAML file:
en:
  welcome:  "Dear @{f:Lady|m:Sir|n:You|All}"

en:
  i18n:
    inflections:
      gender:
        f:        "female"
        m:        "male"
        n:        "neuter"
        female:   @f
        male:     @m
        neuter:   @n
        man:      @male
        woman:    @female
        default:  n
In a controller:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  inflection_method :gender

  # assuming that @gender is set somewhere
  def gender
    @gender || nil
  end

end

class UsersController < ApplicationController

  # t() will call method gender() from the current context
  # to get the inflection token
  def say_welcome
    t('welcome')
    # => "Dear Sir"
  end

end

Description

You can create your own kinds (gender, title, person, time, author, etc.) of tokens to group them in a meaningful, semantical sets.

This plug-in adds inflection_method, no_inflection_method and no_inflection_method_for clauses that can be used in controllers and views. Using that clauses makes it easy to register methods that will be called to obtain certain inflection options. It is also possible to set up an inflection method for a so called strict kind commonly used in a so called named and complex patterns.

This plug-in uses i18n-inflector module which allows passing inflection options to the translate method. You may find I18n Inflector’s API and a default object very helpful since they allow you to read inflection data in many different ways. You might, for example, use it to generate forms containing lists of languages that are using inflection, or to view all known inflection kinds or tokens assigned to them.

To access the Inflector object bound to default I18n backend use:

I18n.inflector

Note about YAML parsing

The previous example is not compatible with Psych parser, which is used by Rails 3. There are two ways to solve that problem.

First is to change a YAML file and replace any value that has special meaning with a symbol:

en:
  i18n:
    inflections:
      gender:
        f:        "female"
        m:        "male"
        n:        "neuter"
        female:   :@f
        male:     :@m
        neuter:   :@n
        man:      :@male
        woman:    :@female
        default:  :n

Second way is to use other parser by adding to config/boot.rb:

require 'yaml'
YAML::ENGINE.yamler = 'syck'

Requirements

Download

Source code

Gem

Installation

  • gem install i18n-inflector-rails

Specs

You can run RSpec examples both with

  • rake spec or just rake

  • run a test file directly, e.g. ruby -Ilib -Ispec spec/inflector_spec.rb

More information

See I18n::Inflector::Rails::ClassMethods to learn how to use inflection_method and no_inflection_method.

See I18n::Inflector::Rails::InflectedTranslate to learn about using the translation wrapper.

See I18n::Inflector::InflectionOptions to know more about switches that can be used to control the engine.

See the whole documentation for more information.

To know how the basics and to learn more about Inflector that is used by this plug-in see I18n Inflector documentation.

Credits

Heise Media Polska supports Free Software and has contributed to this plug-in by paying for me to eat when I’ve been coding.

License

Copyright © 2011 by Paweł Wilk.

i18n-inflector-rails is copyrighted software owned by Paweł Wilk ([email protected]). You may redistribute and/or modify this software as long as you comply with either the terms of the LGPL (see LGPL-LICENSE), or Ruby’s license (see COPYING).

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.