Comments on: Another use for const_missing – generating unicode characters in strings

By: Dr Nic

Dr Nic — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:06:35 +0000

@robby – ah ok I understand where you’re coming from. Now I also realise that I don’t like ( TM ) either! Perhaps TM* or TM# instead. I’ll talk to W3C about fixing that…

By: Paul Battley

Paul Battley — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:58:55 +0000

That’s not ‘Death Miffy’ – it’s Borg Kitty!

(You’re right about needing ‘require “rubygems”‘; I didn’t need it because I have ‘RUBYOPT=rubygems’ in my environment variables, but I expect that most people don’t.)

By: Robby Russell

Robby Russell — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:50:10 +0000

sans the extra parens… argh. :-p

By: Robby Russell

Robby Russell — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:49:51 +0000

Ah, your blog renders textile..

((tm)) => ™

By: Robby Russell

Robby Russell — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:49:23 +0000

@dr nic,

It’s based on the convention that Textile already has. For example, ™creates a trademark symbol and we wanted to keep it consistent with new characters. In a nutshell, we extended the Textile process with another 80 characters/symbols.

By: Dr Nic

Dr Nic — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:17:27 +0000

@paul – your “death miffy” gravatar is disturbing. I don’t think I’ll be able to look at my son’s miffy doll the same way again…

By: Dr Nic

Dr Nic — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:16:20 +0000

@paul – thx; example updated. (NOTE: need to require ‘rubygems’ to access the gem now we’re not in the comfortable world of Rails console)

@robby – that’s nice. I’m not sure if I like the surrounding parentheses, personally, because I often forget that I want a variation of u, for example, and I’d need to press the back arrow to put the bracket in, then forwards again etc. But I assume (u~) is easier to parse, than u~.

By: Robby Russell

Robby Russell — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:08:22 +0000

This reminds me of something that I worked on recently for one of our clients that deals with publishing. Their editors aren’t going to want to remember all the unicode characters and we’re also using textile, so we created a library that converts things like so:

(u`) (u~) for about eighty characters. To take it a step further, as they start to type in their edit panels, it provides a help menu of available options. Hoping that we’ll be able to demo some of that stuff soon.

By: Paul Battley

Paul Battley — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:03:50 +0000

Very clever!

(The only thing script/console does that’s relevant here is to set $KCODE=’u', by the way.)