---
date: "2006-10-19T13:14:55Z"
title: Nifty Little Ruby Libraries
---

<p>
I've been fiddling with these libraries the last couple of days.
</p>

<ul>
<li><a href='http://text.rubyforge.org/'>Text</a>: Useful text utility library.  Includes <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex'>Soundex</a>, <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone'>Metaphone</a>, <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figlet'>Figlet</a>, <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone'>Metaphone</a>, and
<a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein'>Levenshtein distance</a>.</li>
<li><a href='http://rmovie.rubyforge.org/'>RMovie</a>: <a href='http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/'>FFmpeg</a> library wrapper.  It's a real pain in the ass to install, but once you get it working, it allows you to extract arbitrary frames from any video format supported by FFmpeg.</li>
<li><a href='http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/'>Hpricot</a>: <acronym title='HyperText Markup Language'>HTML</acronym> scraper.  Similar to <a href='http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/'>Rubyful Soup</a>, but much faster and with partial support for both <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html'><acronym title='Cascading Style Sheet'>CSS</acronym> selectors</a> and <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath'>XPath</a>.</li>
</ul>

<p>
They're all avaiable as <a href='http://rubygems.org/'>Ruby Gems</a>, too.
</p>