Ruby on Rails

Comments and changes to this ticket

• 

  Jim Cropcho July 27th, 2008 @ 06:03 PM

  #actionize seems useful, if only to have a more readable method for using existing functionality.

  i guess i could say the same about #parameterize, except that its function is to make a string url-safe, in a very generic way, and there are already methods (with appropriate naming, this time) which do that, right?

  http://api.rubyonrails.org/class...

  ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::String::Inflections::underscore()

  is the same thing, I take it?

• 

  Matt Darby July 27th, 2008 @ 06:46 PM

  #underscore and #parameterize differ in how they handle spaces and special characters.

  >> "Donald E. Knuth".underscore
  => "donald e. knuth"
  >> "Donald E. Knuth".parameterize
  => "Donald_E_Knuth"
  

  It seems that #underscore expects a camelcased string, not a more human-readable one.

  #actionize is like #tableize, but it replaces spaces with underscores (by default), and doesn't pluralize the output.

  >> "Expense Report".tableize
  => "expense reports"
  >> "Expense Report".actionize
  => "expense_report"
  

• 

  Jim Cropcho July 27th, 2008 @ 06:48 PM

  +1

• 

  Jim Cropcho July 27th, 2008 @ 06:49 PM

  i guess it looks like the functionality doesn't exist, esp not under the proper naming per its usage. also, it seems genuinely useful.

• 

  Clemens Kofler July 28th, 2008 @ 06:46 AM

  • → Tag changed from “patch” to “activesupport inflector patch”

  actionize seems like a reasonable additional, although I haven't ever needed any funtionality similar to this.

  parameterize is a case by itself. There's lots of plugins out there that provide functionality to create URL friendly permalinks such as Rick's permalink_fu. If you have something like the parameterize functionality, you most definitely also have a permalink column in your model which defies the purpose of the method.

  Another thing to consider is that it doesn't play well with Rails' recent i18n efforts. In non-English speaking countries, it's likely that people's, places' etc. names include non-standard letters.

  Take Tarmo Tänav (sorry for using your name here ;-)) for example. With your Regexp, if we parameterized Tarmo, this would be something like 1-Tarmo_T_nav - which is almost certainly not what you'd want (and definitely not what Tarmo would want).

  To give you an idea what a German version of parameterize would look like, I've uploaded my current permalink creation method. Find it here. Oh, and by the way: When I wrote this code I was pretty new to Ruby and didn't know that Arrays are valid Hash keys - that's why it was inverted! ;-)

• 

  Claudio Poli July 28th, 2008 @ 09:55 AM

  I usually use

  
  t = Iconv.new("ASCII//TRANSLIT", "utf-8").iconv(text)
  
  t = t.downcase.strip.gsub(/[^-_\s[:alnum:]]/, '').squeeze(' ').tr(' ', '-')
  
  (t.blank?) ? '-' : t
  
  

  for permalinks, can be optimized though.

• 

  Matt Darby July 28th, 2008 @ 12:53 PM

  @Clemens

  Actually, I don't use permalinks in this application. I simply override #to_param to make the link a little more helpful to the end user and for cheap SEO.

  You make a good point about #parameterize's anglo-centric-ness. I'm going to look at what kain posted and see if that will fill in the gaps.

  As for #actionize; it's really nice for DRYing up cases such as the 'report' example I listed earlier. At any rate it seems as though it would be a natural add to Inflector as the functionality doesn't exist.

• 

  Damian Janowski August 4th, 2008 @ 09:28 PM

  Iconv behaves differently in different platforms. Ping Xavier Noria and he'll explain.

• 

  DHH September 10th, 2008 @ 06:29 AM

  • → State changed from “new” to “committed”

  I like parameterize and have used that in quite a few cases. I don't think the anglo approach is that big of a deal, especially not since it's usually a good idea to keep those parts of the URL ascii anyway. I've changed a few defaults, though.

  I don't really see the general use of actionize, though. That seems pretty specific to your app.

• 

  Damian Janowski September 10th, 2008 @ 01:24 PM

  @DHH: The point of using Iconv is not to have UTF8 URLs, but rather to "translate" special characters to their ASCII "equivalents" where possible.

  With the original patch:

  
  "Malmö".parameterize
  => "malm"
  

  With Iconv:

  
  "Malmö".parameterize
  => "malmo"
  

  I think this is very basic and should be provided out of the box. Or, at least, provide a L18N-aware extension point.

• 

  Karel Minařík September 10th, 2008 @ 04:35 PM

  I second Damian. Discovered this only afterwrds in Github commits feed.

  I think the "dumb" transliteration like Malmö => "malm-" really is not a practice to be encouraged by Rails. (See dropping of letters on just about any Rails-based website, be it WWR, Slideshare, etc.)

  I have commented on the commit page

  In Czech context (accented latin characters) we mainly use this solution from Adam Ciganek :

  string.chars.normalize(:kd).to_s.gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/, '')
  

  Although the Iconv way is much more robust.