Hablaba

Hablaba conjugates regular Spanish verbs in seven tenses. Pure Ruby, no runtime dependencies.

Installation

gem install hablaba

Or in a Gemfile:

gem "hablaba"

Usage

require "hablaba"

Hablaba.conjugate("yo", "hablar")                    # => "hablo"
Hablaba.conjugate("yo", "hablar", :preterite)        # => "hablé"
Hablaba.conjugate("nosotros", "comer", :future)      # => "comeremos"
Hablaba.conjugate("ellas", "vivir", :conditional)    # => "vivirían"

The tense defaults to :present. Arguments are case-insensitive, trimmed of surrounding whitespace, and never mutated.

Pronouns

yo  tú  él  ella  usted  nosotros  vosotros  ellos  ellas  ustedes

Accents are optional (tu and el work), and the feminine plurals nosotras and vosotras are accepted. The full list is available as Hablaba::PRONOUNS, a hash of each spelling to its column in a conjugation table.

Tenses

Tense	Example
:present	I speak — hablo
:preterite	I spoke — hablé
:imperfect	I used to speak — hablaba
:present_subjunctive	I hope that I speak — hable
:imperfect_subjunctive	I hoped that I spoke — hablara
:conditional	I would speak — hablaría
:future	I will speak — hablaré

Also available as Hablaba::TENSES.

Errors

Unrecognized input raises, rather than returning something misleading:

Hablaba.conjugate("we", "hablar")            # Hablaba::UnknownPronounError
Hablaba.conjugate("yo", "casa")              # Hablaba::UnknownVerbError
Hablaba.conjugate("yo", "hablar", :pluscuamperfecto) # Hablaba::UnknownTenseError

All three inherit from Hablaba::Error, so a single rescue catches them:

begin
  Hablaba.conjugate(pronoun, verb, tense)
rescue Hablaba::Error => e
  warn e.message
end

Limitations

• Regular verbs only. Irregular verbs are not detected, so Hablaba.conjugate("yo", "tener") returns the regular "teno", not "tengo". Stem-changing verbs (pensar → pienso) and orthographic changes (buscar → busqué) are not handled either.
• The imperfect subjunctive returns the -ra form (hablara), not the -se form (hablase).
• Voseo (vos hablás) is not supported.
• Compound tenses, the imperative, and the participles are not supported.

Development

bundle install
bundle exec rake test

Tests run against Ruby 3.1 through 3.4 in CI. The suite checks the complete conjugation table — every person, in every tense — for one verb of each conjugation.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.