From: "Eregon (Benoit Daloze) via ruby-core" <ruby-core@...>
Date: 2024-01-11T10:26:07+00:00
Subject: [ruby-core:116170] [Ruby master Feature#18576] Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY`

Issue #18576 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze).





@naruse Do you have evidence of (latest release and not ancient) gems or applications comparing `encoding.name` to `'ASCII-8BIT'`?

I think it's so obviously a bad idea to compare the encoding name as a String, AFAIK there was never a valid reason to use it (over `enc == Encoding::BINARY`, which works since Ruby 1.9) and it's inefficient, brittle and unnecessary.



FWIW https://github.com/search?q=%22name+%3D%3D+%27ASCII-8BIT%27%22&type=code&p=1 shows very few matches and it's mostly copies of old VCR code.

The chance of that code running on Ruby 3.4+ seems almost nonexistent, there would likely be many more serious compatibility issues with such old code (e.g. kwargs changes).

And fixing it is really easy.



@matz Can we experiment for 3.4?

If we have pushback based on actual code then let's go more conservative, but otherwise I think we should do the clean fix here.



----------------------------------------

Feature #18576: Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY`

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18576#change-106183



* Author: byroot (Jean Boussier)

* Status: Open

* Priority: Normal

* Target version: 3.4

----------------------------------------

### Context



I'm now used to it, but something that confused me for years was errors such as:



```ruby

>> "f�e" + "\xFF".b

(irb):3:in `+': incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT (Encoding::CompatibilityError)

```



When you aren't that familiar with Ruby, it's really not evident that `ASCII-8BIT` basically means "no encoding" or "binary".



And even when you know it, if you don't read carefully it's very easily confused with `US-ASCII`.



The `Encoding::BINARY` alias is much more telling IMHO.



### Proposal



Since `Encoding::ASCII_8BIT` has been aliased as `Encoding::BINARY` for years, I think renaming it to `BINARY` and then making asking `ASCII_8BIT` the alias would significantly improve usability without backward compatibility concerns.



The only concern I could see would be the consistency with a handful of C API functions:



  - `rb_encoding *rb_ascii8bit_encoding(void)`

  - `int rb_ascii8bit_encindex(void)`

  - `VALUE rb_io_ascii8bit_binmode(VALUE io)`



But that's for much more advanced users, so I don't think it's much of a concern.









-- 

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

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