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:

lzap · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-10 13:45:41Z

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, 2011 at 13:45

lzap

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2 Comments

@Izap: Great! That's what I thought to do. Which Ruby function returns the unicode of the character ?