From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-09-16T23:18:35+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:18632] Re: Special warning for UTF-16? (was: Re:  Re: Working on CSV's Encoding Support)

On Sep 16, 2008, at 5:37 AM, Martin Duerst wrote:

> At 00:43 08/09/15, James Gray wrote:
>
>>> I tried to test with UTF-16 as well, since I think that's a good
>>> edge case.  However, we don't seem to have a converter for that:
>>>
>>> $ ruby_dev ~/Desktop/regexp_encoding.rb #<Encoding:US-ASCII>
>>> #<Encoding:US-ASCII>
>>> /Users/james/Desktop/regexp_encoding.rb:15:in `encode': code
>>> converter not found (US-ASCII to UTF-16) (Encoding::NoConverter)
>>>     from /Users/james/Desktop/regexp_encoding.rb:15:in `<main>'
>>
>> This was my fault.  UTF-16 is not a valid encoding name.  Once I
>> switched to UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE it worked fine.
>
> Just thinking aloud: Although I'm the person who wrote most of the
> original core for String#encode, and should therefore know best,
> I've fallen in that trap several times. Given that, and the fact
> that in the wild, UTF-16 is used quite frequently, suggests that
> other people will make this error, too, and will have difficulties
> to figure out what's wrong.
>
> So I'm suggesting that we produce some special error message for
> UTF-16, such as "UTF-16 not available, use either UTF-16BE or
> UTF-16LE". In general, I don't like such special-casing, but
> given that Ruby tries to be user-friendly, it may be worth
> doing.
>
> Any comments?

I would be for that, or making UTF-16 an alias for UTF-16BE.

James Edward Gray II