How to identify character's language in Ruby/Rails?

Question

Given a character (one letter of a string), how could I identify to which language it belongs ? The options are: English, Russian, Hebrew.

Background: this character was entered by user in a form and then stored in a database.

It can be for example the first letter in one of these words:

http://rubygems.org/gems/kenwaln-whatlanguage – fl00r May 10 '11 at 13:36 — fl00r, May 10 '11 at 13:36
What version of Ruby are you using? – Rachel Shallit May 10 '11 at 13:36 — Rachel Shallit, May 10 '11 at 13:36

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 10 '11 at 13:45

3

The UNICODE standard is divided into "blocks". Go here:

and find unicode blocks (intervals) for each language.

My guess:

So for you its the matter of simple number comparsion for each character (unicode ordinal value). Very simple.

answered May 10 '11 at 13:45

lzap

@Izap: Great! That's what I thought to do. Which Ruby function returns the unicode of the character ? – Misha Moroshko May 10 '11 at 13:50
Glad you like it. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/308749/whats-the-opposite-of-chr-in-ruby – lzap May 10 '11 at 13:56

1 Answers1