Angelos Orfanakos

Convert Greek to Greeklish in Ruby with greeklish_iso843

A common need for many Greek Rails projects I work on is converting Greek text to Greeklish, a process known as transliteration. I use it mainly to generate URL-safe slugs.

There are many ways to go about this, but the ISO 843 standard (based on the “ΕΛΟΤ 743” Greek standard) is the one used by the Greek State.

A while back, I put in the effort and ported an official, buggy implementation from JavaScript to Ruby, vastly improving it in the process. I’ve been using it ever since, copying it from project to project.

Today I decided to open-source it and the result is a Gem called greeklish_iso843.

Update: Now available as an online service.