I ranted and I raved and I tried and failed :-)
Unfortunately, my proposal to wreak havoc in the String class proved
futile - it popped up bugs that I never seen before (among others CGI
escaping and ERB broke, the latter in a rather intricate way).
Outside of these two problems the solution worked on my applications
though (but I would not recommend using it in production by now as
all the implications become clear). Also the speed overhead proved
very substantial. However, after some more tweaks I have come to the
simple idea of having proxy access to the characters instead of
subclassing. Maybe this can be useful for ActiveSupport (it is going
to be able to address the more expensive routines only where
characters are involved, and when Matz finally comes up with a good
M17N engine - doh - it will be a matter of aliasing a method to self.
Works (in general) like this:
@some_unicode_string.u.length
@some_unicode_string.u.reverse
etc. with modifications to the string in-place where necessary.
Here is the test suite
http://julik.textdriven.com/svn/tools/rails_plugins/unicode_hacks/
test/t_string_overrides.rb
I think this can be refactored nicely into the string extensions in
ActiveSupport, after that things like validates_length_of and
truncate will be able to address the characters explicitly without
resorting to regexen. And the users get a goot head start on Unicode
in their apps from the get go.
It has an implicit dependency on the Unicode gem for normalization
and capitalization, but that can be easily stubbed out to dummy
methods and made optional (having, for example, an alert in the
development log). Considering that Rails has some implicit
dependencies all by itself I don't see that as too much burden, but
this is my opinion of course.
I will gladly provide a patch shall the core find this something
noteworthy.
--
Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov
please send all personal mail to
me at julik.nl
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