From: Michael Selig <michael.selig@...>
Date: 2008-09-17T08:27:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:18637] Reading non-ascii compatible files

Hi,

I have noticed this under Linux:

ruby -v -E UTF-16BE -e "open('/tmp/xx')"
ruby 1.9.0 (2008-09-16 revision 19371) [i686-linux]
-e:1:in `initialize': ASCII incompatible encoding needs binmode  
(ArgumentError)
	from -e:1:in `open'
	from -e:1:in `<main>'

So it seems the only way I can open a UTF-16 file for reading is with the  
"b" flag, which I thought was only for Windows.
The weird thing is that I can open it for writing without "b".

Worse is that some methods which don't take a "mode" parameter don't work  
at all:

ruby -v -E UTF-16BE -e "IO.readlines('/tmp/xx')"
ruby 1.9.0 (2008-09-16 revision 19371) [i686-linux]
-e:1:in `readlines': ASCII incompatible encoding needs binmode  
(ArgumentError)
	from -e:1:in `<main>'

Why is this? Bug?

Even under Windows this doesn't make much sense to me!

Cheers
Mike