Ruby Best Practices

Chapter 7. Reducing Cultural Barriers

Ten years ago, a book on best practices for any given programming language would seem perfectly complete without a chapter on multilingualization (m17n) and localization (L10n). In 2009, the story is just a little bit different.

Now that we’ve created a network of applications and infrastructure designed not simply to be used by hackers and researchers, but by nontechnical folks as part of their day-to-day lives, we are living in a very different world. With most software serving first and foremost as a communication medium, it is unrealistic to think that all conversations should be conducted in English or require the use of specialized tools otherwise. This presents a challenge to those who implement software that needs to be accessible to a global user base.

Although some may argue that it took too long to materialize, Ruby 1.9 provides a robust and elegant solution to the m17n problem. Rather than binding its users to a particular internal encoding and requiring complex manual manipulation of text into that format, Ruby 1.9 provides facilities that make it easy to transcode text from one encoding to another. This system is well integrated so that things like pattern matching and I/O operations can be carried out in all of the encodings Ruby supports, which provides a great deal of flexibility for those who need to do encoding-specific operations. Of course, because painless transcoding is possible, you can also write code that accepts ...