Sterile

Sterilize your strings! Transliterate, generate slugs, smart format, strip tags, encode/decode entities and more.

Usage

Sterile provides functionality both as class methods on the Sterile module and as extensions to the String class. Each function also has a "bang" version to replace the string in place.

Sterile.transliterate("šţɽĩɳģ") # => "string"

"šţɽĩɳģ".transliterate # => "string"

str = "šţɽĩɳģ"
str.transliterate!
str == "string" # => true

Transliterate

Transliterate Unicode [and accented ASCII] characters to their plain-text ASCII equivalents. This is based on data from the stringex gem (https://github.com/rsl/stringex) which is in turn a port of Perl's Unidecode and ostensibly provides superior results to iconv. The optical conversion data is based on work by Eric Boehs at https://github.com/ericboehs/to_slug

"šţɽĩɳģ".transliterate # => "string"

Passing an option of :optical => true will prefer optical mapping instead of more pedantic matches. The optical dataset is incomplete, but will fall back to the pedantic match if missing.

Smart Format

Format text with proper "curly" quotes, m-dashes, copyright, trademark, etc.

q{"He said, 'Away with you, Drake!'"}.smart_format
# => “He said, ‘Away with you, Drake!’”

You can also use smart formatting with HTML:

%q{"He said, <b>'Away with you, Drake!'</b>"}.smart_format_tags
# => "&ldquo;He said, <b>&lsquo;Away with you, Drake!&rsquo;</b>&ldquo;"

Entities

Turn Unicode characters into their HTML equivilents. If a valid HTML entity is not possible, it will create a numeric entity.

q{“Economy Hits Bottom,” ran the headline}.encode_entities # => "&ldquo;Economy Hits Bottom,&rdquo; ran the headline"

Turn HTML entities into unicode characters:

"&ldquo;Economy Hits Bottom,&rdquo; ran the headline".decode_entities # => "“Economy Hits Bottom,” ran the headline"

Titlecase

Format text appropriately for titles. This method is much smarter than ActiveSupport's titlecase. The algorithm is based on work done by John Gruber et al (http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/title_case_update). It gets closer to the AP standard for title capitalization, including proper support for small words and handles a variety of edge cases.

"Q&A with Steve Jobs: 'That's what happens in technology'".titlecase
# => "Q&A With Steve Jobs: 'That's What Happens in Technology'"

"Small word at end is nothing to be afraid of".titleize # alias for titlecase
# => "Small Word at End Is Nothing to Be Afraid Of"

Strip Tags

Remove HTML/XML tags from text. Also strips out comments, PHP and ERB style tags.

'Visit our <a href="http://example.com">website!</a>'.strip_tags # => "Visit our website!"

Miscellaneous

Transliterate to ASCII, downcase and format for URL permalink/slug by stripping out all non-alphanumeric characters and replacing spaces with a delimiter (defaults to '-', configured by :delimiter option).

"Hello World!".sluggerize # => "hello-world"
    "Hello World!".to_slug # => "hello-world"

Transliterate to ASCII and strip out any HTML/XML tags.

"<b>nåsty</b>".sterilize # => "nasty"

Trim whitespace from start and end of string and remove any redundant whitespace in between.

" Hello  world! ".transliterate # => "Hello world!"

Iterate over all text in between HTML/XML tags and yield text to a block, replace by what the block returns.

"Only <i>uppercase</i> the <b>text</b> in this".gsub_tags { |t| t.upcase }

Iterate over all text in between HTML/XML tags and yield to a block.

"Only <i>output</i> the <b>text</b> in this".scan_tags { |t| puts t }

Warning / To Do

All the *_tags functions are based on a regular expressions. Yes, I know this is wrong and I plan to using a proper parser for it in the future.

Installation

Install with RubyGems:

gem install sterile