Overview

tests
package

A simple package to help sort non-English names.

• Free software: BSD 2-Clause License

Installation

pip install anglicize

You can also install the in-development version with:

pip install https://github.com/rciorba/python-anglicize/archive/master.zip

Documentation

This library provides one function, which takes a string and substitutes characters.

To use:

# call the function directly:
anglicize("Łukasz") == "Lukasz"

# or use it to sort a list:
sorted(["Ana", "Łukasz", "Zack"], key=anglicize) == ["Ana", "Łukasz", "Zack"]

# there we go, that's much better than this:
sorted(["Ana", "Łukasz", "Zack"]) == ["Ana", "Zack", "Łukasz"]

Rationale

The purpose of this library is to help you sort non-English names writen in Latin-based alphabets.

Different languages have wildly different rules for sorting, for example Ö comes after Z in Finnish but after O in Hungarian. The approach taken here is to treat visually similar letters the same, so basically ÖÔÓÒṌṎ (and others) should all become O.

Handling letters that have little similarity to A-Z

The German ß is the main issue here. I chose to handle it like an S, mostly because it's different enough from B (the most similar visually) and because it's well known as a version of S to most Europeans.

Languages covered

• Albanian
• Azerbaijani
• Bosnian
• Bulgarian transliteration
• Croatian
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• Gagauz
• German
• Hungarian
• Icelandic
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Luxembourgish
• Montenegrin
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Serbian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Tatar
• Turkish
• Turkmen

Contributing

Do you know a language written in a Latin alphabet and want to check it's correctly handled? Have a look in tests/test_anglicize.py. If the language is there please check all "special" letters are handled. This list has been mostly compiled off of Wikipedia, so I would not be surprised to hear about errors :)

You can either make the changes and submit a PR or just create an issue mentioning - language - characters which need handling

Development

To run tests for all Python environments run:

tox