free-software tutorial, tips and projects
cssrtl.pyThis is a re-release of a script of mine that helps convert CSS layouts to RTL. I originally released it about a year ago but it was lost when I moved to the new blog. The script, cssrtl.py, utilizes a bunch of regular expressions to translate a given CSS layout to RTL.
I’m working on a website and we decided to localize it using GNU gettext. Soon enough I found it tiring to wrap each string manually in _( and ) and also to do it in Smarty (using {t}string{/t}. So I decided that I need a macro that will let highlight the string that needs translation and the macro will wrap for me.
I ended up writing two macros one for PHP files (but it’s also good for C/C++ etc.) and one for smarty.
:vmap tg di_(<ESC>pa)<ESC>
:vmap ts di{t}<ESC>pa{/t}<ESC>To use these macros just highlight the string for translation in vim’s visual mode and press tg (or ts), and your string will be wrapped for translation.
mb_truncateWhen working with Smarty, a PHP templating engine, I discovered that while the regular truncate modifier works great on ASCII strings, it doesn’t work with multibyte strings, i.e. UTF-8 encoded strings. This leads to problems in internationalization (i18n), as UTF-8 is the popular encoding for non-Latin alphabets nowdays. The problem can be solved by modifying the built-in truncate modifier and create a new one that takes an additional argument, the charset of the string, and acts accordingly. The new modified modifier, mb_truncate is implemented below.
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