Unichars

Unichars is a simple wrapper around Glib2. It was originally written to speed up ActiveSupport::Multibyte on Ruby 1.8 but it can probably used for other things as well.

Installation

Max OS X

You have to install Glib2. We suggest Homebrew, but anything goes.

$ brew install glib

After that you can install the gem:

$ gem install unichars

Ubuntu and Debian

$ apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
$ gem install unichars

Examples

Rails

In you Gemfile add:

gem 'unichars'

Add config/initializers/unichars.rb:

ActiveSupport::Multibyte.proxy_class = Unichars

After that you can just use Unichars through the character proxy on String:

'¡Ay Dios mío!'.chars.reverse

ActiveSupport without Rails

Note that you probably want to load ActiveSupport before loading Unichars because Unichars subclasses itself from ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars when you do so.

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_support/all'
require 'unichars'
ActiveSupport::Multibyte.proxy_class = Unichars

After that you can just use Unichars through the character proxy on String:

'¡Ay Dios mío!'.chars.reverse

Plain Ruby code

Yeah, so, ehm. Yeah.

require 'rubygems'
require 'unichars'

After that you can do:

Unichars.new('¡Ay Dios mío!').reverse

Or possibly:

class String
  def mb_chars
    Unichars.new(self)
  end
end