Getting MySQL compare Unicode Greek Extended characters correctly
posted: February 8th, 2007 · by: Sven
Lately I ran into an interesting issue with MySQL’s string comparsion that I haven’t seen before.
I’ve been setting up a simple vocabulary and grammar learning program for my spouse who’s started learning ancient greek a while ago. After she’s entered some testdata containing several funny looking ancient greek characters we saw that MySQL 4.1 seems to treat the following characters as equal when compared as VARCHAR:
| Char. | Unicode Codepos. |
UTF-8 | Name |
 |
U+03B7 | 206 183 | eta |
 |
U+1F75 | 225 189 181 | eta w/ oxia |
 |
U+1FC4 | 225 191 135 | eta w/ persispomeni and ypogegrammenti |
These characters are stored and retrieved correctly (which was a nice thing to watch, by the way). But when it comes to compare them to each other they are wrongly regarded the same character.
Read the rest of this entryUpcoming Globalize feature: an alternative way of storing model translations
posted: January 31st, 2007 · by: Sven
Saimon Moore, one of the Globalize committers, pointed me to some terrific new Globalize functionality that most likely will make it into the next (for-1.2 that is) release of Globalize (which is expected to arrive pretty soon).
Saimon has described said feature himself in a blog article: Alternative implementation of Globalize Model Translations. But there’s a lot of code to read over there so I thought I’d sum things up a bit for you.
Read the rest of this entryGlobalize's advanced features - Get on Rails with Globalize! Part 3 of 8
posted: January 14th, 2007 · by: Sven
In Part 2 of this series you’ve seen:
- how to setup your application to use Unicode
- how to select and keep the current user’s locale
- how to translate entire templates (instead of individual strings)
- how to translate Rails ActiveRecord messages
In this article we’ll talk about some of the more advanced features Globalize comes with like:
- Abstracting ViewTranslations (sprintf-like usage)
- Singular and (multiple) plural ViewTranslations
- Globalize’s Currency class
- Piggybacking translations of associated models
Some common questions on getting started - Get on Rails with Globalize! Part 2 of 8
posted: December 3rd, 2006 · by: Sven
In Part 1 of this series you’ve seen how easy it is to get up and running with Globalize. And you’ve seen what the most basic concepts of this multilanguage plugin for Ruby on Rails are, namely:
.tfor ViewTranslations (arbitrary, static text)- the
translatesdirective for ModelTranslations and .locto localize your date, time and number formats.
In this article we’ll talk about some common questions on getting started like:
- How to setup your application to use Unicode
- How to select and keep the current user’s locale
- How to translate entire templates (instead of individual strings)
- How to translate Rails ActiveRecord messages
(Update 06/12/06.: mention ActiveRecord::Multibyte and explain MySQL/Unicode character-set)
Read the rest of this entryFive minutes instant overview - Get on Rails with Globalize! Part 1 of 8
posted: November 10th, 2006 · by: Sven
So you’ve just found out that Globalize is the Rails plugin to bring multilanguage support to your applications? And you’re now looking for an instant overview of what Globalize can do for you?
Then here’s some good news for you. By the end of this article you’ll know:
- how to install and configure Globalize and
- how to use it to translate your Rails applications.
Get on Rails with Globalize: a comprehensive writeup in 8 parts
posted: November 10th, 2006 · by: Sven
I don’t know where you’re coming from. But my former experiences using I18n solutions have never been so much fun.
I’ve been absolutely thrilled about Globalize. Imagine to just plug-in some extension and instantly being able to use simple, intuitive mechanisms to translate your (now multi-language) application. Wouldn’t that be wonderful exactly the way you’d expect a Rails solution for your most common programming problems to work?
Well, Globalize is just that. Globalize is a powerful, yet elegant and usable Rails plugin that’s here to help you with the translation and localization of:
- arbitrary text like in templates (“hello world!”), mails, messages, etc.
- model data like text that goes in the database as part of your ActiveRecord classes
- stuff like dates, time, numbers, currency etc.
This series is here to help you get started and get the most out of Globalize.
Read the rest of this entryStarting an article series on Globalize
posted: November 10th, 2006 · by: Sven
Yes. I finally managed to finish the (first version of the) first part of my series “Get on Rails with Globalize”.
My idea with this write-up is to provide a complete summary of everything about and around Globalize – which IMO is the most complete, most elegant and (notably) most Rail’ish I18n solution available.
I thus started weeding through the archives of the Rails I18n and the Globalize mailing list (well, sort of, I needed to use my local archive to weed the latter because it’s badly missing an online archive so far), the Globalize wiki and several other ressources Google came up with.
I started my work on this series by the end of August, having been timed-out by obligations and stuff again and again. It also actually took me a while to collect and sieve out the relevant bits of information, check their up-to-dateness (e.g. of bug reports), sort and split everything into chunks and topics. But hey, I think this will have been worth that while. So … finally … here we go :-)
Real fun: Get on Rails with Globalize (take #2)
posted: June 13th, 2006 · by: Sven
This article is a bit outdated and has been replaced by an entire series in the meantime: “Get on Rails with Globalize: a comprehensive writeup in 6 parts”.
This is the second version of my writeup about Globalize. My first attemp was too much a literal protocol of my actual steps – which haven’t actually mixed that well with a newbie intro to Globalize. So simply let’s start over.
I initially really shyed away from translating a pretty simple application just because of my previous experiences with t10n/i18n libraries that were nothing else but a big pain and hassle …
Ever felt the same? Then here’s some good news for yor. If you’re going to add multi-language support to a Ruby on Rails application I suggest you give Globalize a serious try.
The docs are a bit spare so at first it seemed to me that things don’t work as announced (or: at all). But once I understood how Globalize works everything went like a charm and was incredibly simple to use (at least for the very basic stuff I’ve tried so far).
So, I’ll put together how things worked for me.
Read the rest of this entryReal fun: Get on Rails with Globalize
posted: June 9th, 2006 · by: Sven
Update: If you’re interested in reading about my adventures … this article might be for you. But if you’re interested in getting started with Globalize then please refer to this follow-up version of this article.
I first shyed away from adding multi-language support to folksr (my experimental voting application) ... mostly because of my previous experiences with t10n/i18n libraries and tools which were basically nothing else but a big pain.
Ever felt the same? Then there’s some good news for you. If you’re going to add multi-language support to a Ruby on Rails application I suggest you give Globalize a serious try.
The docs are a bit spare so at first it seemed to me that things don’t work as announced (or: at all). But once I understood how to Globalize works it went like a charm and is incredibly simple to use (at least for the mostly very basic stuff I’ve tried so far).
I’ll put together how things worked for me.
Read the rest of this entry