Web Side Attractions

After a little bit of hacking I’ve got a basic Mongrel plugin together to handle gziping and deflating a HTTP response body if a client accepts it and if activated in a Mongrel config script.
It’s based closely on the plugins I mentioned in my earlier post.

It’s probably not production ready (although I haven’t found any immediate or glaring problems with it so far), and it desperately needs some tests written. But other than that it’s good to go!

It can be found as at http://rubyforge.org/projects/mongrel-compres/.

Tags: compression, HTTP, mongrel, Ruby, rubygems

Today I started to look for a way to add HTTP compression to a Rails app I’m working on. After a quick search I found a couple of plugins that seemed adequate, each with their own advantages. I thought briefly about making my own plugin from what I like best about each, but then I realized this seemed a more appropriate for the server layer. Thus I looked into if mongrel had support for this. What I found is a Deflate Filter provided by the mongrel gem. But this is not nearly as robust as the plugins I found.

So, I’ve begun work on a Mongrel plugin for offering this functionality.
More to come…

Tags: compression, HTTP, mongrel, Ruby

Today at work I had to take a whole set of directory upon directory of files and convert them from one character encoding to UTF-8. Of course, this was instantly a task I said a script should do. And along came the following script. It takes two options one required, defining the character encoding of the files being converted, using the flag “-f”. The other optional, defining the character encoding the files are to be converted to, using the flag “-t”. The second is optional because the default is to convert to is UTF-8. Finally, it accepts an argument list of directories or file names and processes each recurcively going through each directory processing each file and/or directory in it. It ignores all invisible files (those that start with “.”). It will most likely fail for a given file if the character encoding is off. But it will continue with the other files notifing the user that there was an issue.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -KU

require 'optparse'
require 'ostruct'
require 'iconv'

SCRIPT_NAME = "File Character Encoding Converter"
SCRIPT_VERSION = "0.1"

class FileEncodingConverterOptionParser

   def self.parse(args)
      options = OpenStruct.new
      options.to = 'UTF-8'
      options.verbose = false

      opts = OptionParser.new do |opts|
         opts.banner = "Usage: convert_encoding.rb [options] directory|file..."

         opts.separator ""
         opts.separator "Specific options:"

         opts.on("-f", "--from ENCODING", "Character Encoding converting from") do |encoding|
            options.from = encoding
         end

         opts.on("-t", "--to ENCODING", "Character Encoding converting to") do |encoding|
            options.to = encoding
         end

         opts.separator ""
         opts.separator "Common options:"

         opts.on("-v", "--[no-]verbose", "Run verbosely") do |v|
            options.verbose = v
         end

         opts.on_tail("-h", "--help", "Show this message") do
            puts opts
            exit
         end

         opts.on_tail("-V", "--version", "Show version") do
            puts SCRIPT_NAME + ' ' + SCRIPT_VERSION
            exit
         end

      end

      opts.parse!(args)
      options
   end

end

options = FileEncodingConverterOptionParser.parse(ARGV)
VERBOSE = options.verbose ? true : false

class FileEncodingConverter

   def initialize(from, to = 'UTF-8')
      @to = to
      @from = from
   end

   def fconv(filename)
      begin
         contents = File.open(filename).read
         output = Iconv.conv(@to, @from, contents)
         file = File.open(filename, 'w')
         file.write(output)
      rescue Iconv::IllegalSequence
         puts "Could not be processed: #{filename}"
      else
         if VERBOSE
            puts "Processed successfully: #{filename}"
         end
      ensure
         if defined? file
            if file
               file.close
               file = nil
            end
         end
      end
   end

   def process_dir(dir)
      Dir.foreach(dir){ |filename| 
         if !filename.match(/^\./)
            absolute_path = dir + '/' + filename
            if File.file?(absolute_path)
               self.fconv(absolute_path)
            elsif File.directory?(absolute_path)
               self.process_dir(absolute_path)
            end
         end
      }
   end

end

converter = FileEncodingConverter.new(options.from, options.to)

ARGV.each { |arg| 
   wd = Dir.getwd
   entryname = arg.match(/^\//) ? wd + '/' + arg : arg
   if File.directory?(entryname)
      converter.process_dir(entryname)
   elsif File.file?(entryname)
      converter.fconv(entryname)
   end
}

• Script file download

Tags: ruby, iconv, utf8, encodings, scripting