Allow specifying hyphen character.

[e2]

Hi!

Patch (with tests) that allows user to specify something other than '-' (hyphen-minus) for hyphen.

Tested on Ruby 1.9.3 and 1.8.7.

I was wondering if this belongs here. I believe it does, since prawnpdf/prawn expects the soft-hyphen "\u00AD" instead.

Sure, users could just use:

.gsub('-', "\u00AD")

but that would need to be done on every word, even when the result is already cached by text-hyphen.

Also, people often use the minus sign because it's on the keyboard, when they really mean one of:

• hyphen bullet ("\u2043") [yes, I just "sinned" too, but markdown forgives me ...]
• non-breaking hyphen ("\u2011")
• unicode minus sign ("\2212")
• a ... um ... hyphen ("\2010")

Sorry for the rant, I just wanted to show I did my homework and some thinking.

[halostatue]

Good patch, for the most part. I'm not fond of the version detection in the test, though.

Yes, it should work with \u00ad, but why not try it with "­" as the string instead of the Unicode value? That way, you've got a multibyte string that you don't have to check whether you're running in Ruby 1.8 or Ruby 1.9.

Finally, please update the documentation for the methods (and maybe even provide a new example in the README) and this check-in is a slam-dunk for merge. I like it!

[e2]

Your comments made sense, thanks.

I thought about adding an '-s' option to ruby-hyphen to see if it would make sense, but there's missing method:

$ruby-hyphen -H 5 backpack 

/home/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/text-hyphen-1.2/bin/ruby-hyphen:98:in `block in <top (required)>': undefined
method `visualise_to' for #<Text::Hyphen:0x00000002924990> (NoMethodError)

So, I just gave up with that idea.

[e2]

Let me know when you merge this, so I can nuke my fork. I already have enough forks to open up a restaurant...

[halostatue]

And merged.