Working With Rails

Gibberish

= Gibberish

Yet another localization library. Maybe with the most agreeable API?

= Usage

It’s simple. Your default language, by default, is English (:en).

“Hey there!”[:hey] => “Hey there!”

Gibberish looks in RAILS_ROOT/lang/*.yml for translation files. Say you have RAILS_ROOT/lang/es.yml, right? Gibberish will detect that you know about the :es language and will serve up translations defined in that file if requested to do so.

Here’s a real simple example file (it’s just “key: translation”): And, as follows, a real simple example session:

“Hey there!”[:hey] => “Hey there!” Gibberish.current_language => :en Gibberish.current_language = :es => :es “Hey there!”[:hey] => “¡Hey allí!“ Gibberish.current_language = nil => nil “Hey there!”[:hey] => “Hey there!”

It even works with simple interpolation:

“Hey, {name}!”[:hey_name, ‘Chris’] => “Hey, Chris!” “{name} is from {place}”[:hey_place, ‘Chris’, ‘the Dreamworld’] => “Chris is from the Dreamworld”

Notice we don’t use hashes (#) like normal Ruby interpolation. Also, the names of the variables in the brackets don’t really mean much. Interpolation is done in order—the first argument replaces the first variable in brackets, the second the second, etc.

This of course works with your translations:

$ cat lang/es.yml
hey: ¡Hey allí!
hey_name: ¡Hola {name}!

“Hey, {name}!”[:hey_name, ‘Chris’] => “Hey, Chris!” Gibberish.current_language = :es => :es “Hey, {name}!”[:hey_name, ‘Cristóbal’] => ¡Hola Cristóbal!

Neat. What other methods do we get?

The classic around_filter:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  around_filter :set_language

private
  def set_language
    Gibberish.use_language(session[:language]) { yield }
  end
end

For the duration of the block, :es is set as the language of choice. After the block is run everything returns to normal. Rad.

Finally, some checking methods, if you need them:

Gibberish.default_language? => true Gibberish.current_language = :es => :es Gibberish.current_language => :es Gibberish.default_language? => false

Languages are loaded by default at Rails startup. In dev mode, language YAML files are reloaded when modified. No need to reboot the server.

Gibberish.load_languages! => [:es, :fr, :de, :kl] Gibberish.languages => [:es, :fr, :de, :kl]

More as it’s needed.

= Warning

By default, Ruby returns nil when a symbol is passed to String’s [] method. Some of Rails, it seems, depends on this behavior. Yes, I am changing !!core Ruby behavior!! The humanity!

To deal with this assumption, Gibberish has a reserved_keys array. It, by default, contains :limit (so Rails migrations don’t explode on you.) To add to this array, just pass it more keys:

Gibberish.add_reserved_key :another_key => [:limit, :another_key] Gibberish.add_reserved_keys :more, :keys => [:limit, :another_key, :more, :keys]

You’ve been warned. It really shouldn’t affect you, though.

Chris Wanstrath => chris[at]ozmm[dot]org

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly