Encounter troubles with Regex in Chinese text splitting

[Mike Meng]

Hi All,
I'm a Ruby newbie. I'm writting a program to process a big chunk of
Chinese text. The first step is to split the chunk of text into a list
of sentences. In Chinese, all the characters are listed one by one
without any natural boundary tag like space in English. Sentences are
separated by one of three special characters(。？！). So at the
first glance, I thought it's a simple task:

# $chunk stores the text body
$sentenses = $chunk.split(/。|？|！/)
# now $sentenses holds the list of sentences.

By when I checked the result, I found some of the sentenses didn't
split well. For instance, here is a sentense:
"你没病，他呢？" (means "You are not sick, how about him?") . In
GB2312, "病，" is encoded to (hex) b2a1 a3ac, and "。" happens to be
encoded to (hex) a1a3. So the String#split method finds there is a
"。" in the middle of the sentense and incorrectly do the splitting.

Certainly this is because the String#split (and the Ruby regex
engine) is byte-oriented instead of true character-oriented, and it's a
frequent problem in i18n domain. Is there any ways in Ruby to correct
split Chinese text?

Thanks in advance.

myan

[Park Heesob]

Hi,

>From: "Mike Meng" <meng...@gmail.com>
>Reply-To: ruby...@ruby-lang.org
>To: ruby...@ruby-lang.org (ruby-talk ML)
>Subject: Encounter troubles with Regex in Chinese text splitting
>Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 14:42:31 +0900
>
>Hi All,
> I'm a Ruby newbie. I'm writting a program to process a big chunk of
>Chinese text. The first step is to split the chunk of text into a list
>of sentences. In Chinese, all the characters are listed one by one
>without any natural boundary tag like space in English. Sentences are

>separated by one of three special characters(?ゑｼ滂ｼ?. So at the

>first glance, I thought it's a simple task:
>
># $chunk stores the text body

>$sentenses = $chunk.split(/??�ｼ?�ｼ?)

># now $sentenses holds the list of sentences.
>
> By when I checked the result, I found some of the sentenses didn't
>split well. For instance, here is a sentense:

>"菴豐｡?��ｼ御ｻ門造�ｼ?quot; (means "You are not sick, how about him?") . In
>GB2312, "?��ｼ� is encoded to (hex) b2a1 a3ac, and "??quot; happens to be

>encoded to (hex) a1a3. So the String#split method finds there is a

>"??quot; in the middle of the sentense and incorrectly do the splitting.

>
> Certainly this is because the String#split (and the Ruby regex
>engine) is byte-oriented instead of true character-oriented, and it's a
>frequent problem in i18n domain. Is there any ways in Ruby to correct
>split Chinese text?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> myan
>
>

Try the script with $KCODE = "E"

Hope this help,

Park Heesob

[Mike Meng]

Hi Park,
It works. Thank you very much!

Could you please tell me the reason and where can I find relevant
documents?

Thank you.

myan

[Park Heesob]

Hi,

$KCODE is the character coding system Ruby handles. If the first character
of $KCODE is `e' or `E', Ruby handles EUC. If it is `s' or `S', Ruby handles
Shift_JIS. If it is `u' or `U', Ruby handles UTF-8. If it is `n' or `N',
Ruby doesn't handle multi-byte characters. The default value is "NONE".

Regards,

Park Heesob