comp.lang.ruby

Axel Etzold

6/16/2008 10:47:00 AM

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:45:45 +0900
> Von: Michael Lommel <michael.lommel@gmail.com>
> An: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
> Betreff: Ruby to convert US to UK punctuation/spelling?

Dear Michael,

> I have about a thousand multipage documents which I need to convert from
> US English and punctuation to UK English and punctuation. Before I start
> on a ruby script (I'm just learning ruby) wanted to see if anyone knows
> of existing tools to do this? I've also looked into a perl US->UK
> conversion tool but doesn't seem to exist.

for general spell-checking, there is aspell, which you can use with different language
options, and there are Ruby bindings for it:

http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/doc/fauna/raspell/files/R...

So you might use the language option Aspell.new("en_GB") rather than Aspell.new("en_US") for the spell checking of misspelled (in the British English sense) American English text.
If you have so much text, it will find some other errors, that both language forms consider erroneous, too. :)

>I've also looked into a perl US->UK conversion tool but doesn't seem to exist.

There certainly are Perl bindings to aspell- I'd bet a hundred quid/two hundred bucks :)


> For my documents, converting from
> US to UK punctuation means double quotes become single quotes and some
> single quotes become double (apostrophes are retained and single quotes
> not inside double quotes would need to be retained); but in the
> conversion I would like to retain distinct left and right quotation
> marks.

That suggests some combination of String#scan, String#gsub and Regular expressions ...
Since apostrophes and quotation marks are the same sign, I'd suggest making a
list of words with apostrophes, write them to a file, where you can correct them manually,
and String#gsub - replace first the apostrophes by something like <apostrophe>
and then the quotes by <lquote> and <rquote> or the other way round.

There's a Regular expressions tutorial here:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/tut...


> I'm thinking that the end documents should have all print typography
> (em-dashes, en-dashes, printer quotes) should be converted to character
> entities.
>

You can do that with String.gsub("--",'<em-dash>'), after having copied the em-dash
into the double quotes... etc..


Best regards,

Axel
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