rgreek

RGreek

This is the first and only set of tools for working with classical Greek in the Ruby language. They are meant to be straight-forward, lightweight, and comprehensive within their scope.

That said, this is a work-in-progress and this toolset will continue to grow along with my need of them. I am definitely scratching my own itch here.

If you have any problems with the tools or would like them extended, please feel free to write a failing spec and send me a
pull request. I am working on this project semi-actively at the moment and would be happy to fix it.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rGreek'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rGreek

Usage

RGreek::Transcoder

This module converts Greek text bi-directionally between betacode and unicode (Pre-combined Unicode C encoding). To convert any amount of text (that will fit in your machine's memory) simply do:

RGreek::Transcoder.convert(kai/) # =>  καί
RGreek::Transcoder.convert(καί)  # =>  kai/

Caveat Emptor: The Transcoder understands the full betacode spec and can convert seamlessly between unicode and betacode, however, although the Transcoder will convert the rarely used betacode symbol "s2" for final sigma correctly into unicode, it will never generate this symbol when converting unicode to betacode. Instead it will generate the token for a normal sigma ("s"). This is simply because "s2" is sucks to read. Further, all other major transcoders (such as Perseus and the TLG) share this behavior -- it is trivial to detect whether a sigma is final or not. The Transcoder encodes acute accents as oxia, not tonos.

RGreek::Transcoder.tonos_to_oxia(unicode)
RGreek::Transcoder.oxia_to_tonos(unicode)

Since there are two ways in this great, wide, world to encode an acute accent in Greek, the tonos (which was designed for modern Greek) and the oxia (which was designed for polytonic greek), one sometimes needs a way to convert between them. People don't always encode their data correctly. You know who you are. These methods serve that end and cover all cases, including all pre-combined accents with a tonos or an oxia that I could find in the unicode spec. These methods take a string of any length. They leave any non-tonos/oxia chars well enough alone, so no worries.

RGreek::Transcoder.is_betacode?(text)
RGreek::Transcoder.is_unicode?(text)

What these do should be obvious.

RGreek::Transcoder.name_of_unicode_char(c)

In the case that you need to inspect some text to know what sort of encodings or characters your dealing with (and are sick of writing the same test regexs over and over again), this translates the unicode character into an English-named token. It exists so you can easily see what you've got on your hands.

RGreek::Transcoder.tokenize(betacode)

Finally, although this is a private method, if you are interested (or having problems with) the tokenization of betacode in some corner not covered by the specs, this is where the heavy lifting happens

RGreek::MorphCode

RGreek::MorphCode.convert_to_english(code)

This converts the morphology code-strings in the Perseus project database into nice, readable English

RGreek::MonkeyPatches

Debugging programming in Greek can be a real pain, so to aid in that endeavor rgreek adds a method to String, which translates its characters into the proper the hex representation of their unicode code points so they can be clearly seen, understood, and looked up. Ruby 1.9.3 defaults (unhelpfully) to giving the code points in decimal.

"καί".to_unicode_points # => ["03f0", "03b1", "1f77"]

RGreek::Archimedes

RGreek::Archimedes.greek_lemma(kai/) # => {"lu/w" => ["indecl"]}
RGreek::Archimedes.latin_lemma(sed)  # => {"sed" => ["indecl"]}

These form a web-client to the Archimedes service, which is built on top of the Perseus Project parse and lemma data for Greek and Latin words. These methods take inflected words forms and return a hash of possible lemmas they might belong to and an array of possible parsings

Command Line Tool

There is a very rudimentary command-line interface provided as a convenience. Mostly this is just for one off use and an easy extension point. It is not meant to be comprehensive. Feel free to adapt it to your needs. To run it do:

./lib/ui/rgreek convert "kai/" # => καί 
./lib/ui/rgreek convert "καί"  # => kai/

Other Things...

The rest, well, is shall we say, stil under development for a still secret, but hopefully even more exciting project. In the mean time, enjoy the tools!

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request