From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2008-11-27T06:49:58+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20130] Re: Playing with String#bytes

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 03:03:49AM +0900, Rados��aw Bu��at wrote:
> What about:
> data.force_encoding("ASCII-8BIT")[1,3].bytes.to_a
> ?

But that changes the encoding of 'data' as a side-effect. To prevent that,
you'd need

  data.dup.force_encoding("ASCII-8BIT")[1,3].bytes.to_a

which is getting a bit messy. OTOH, I'm not sure how often you'd want to
handle a string which has been tagged as UTF-8 in this way.

BTW, "BINARY" is a synonym for "ASCII-8BIT" and probably makes more sense
here. But oddly, you can't use a Symbol.

irb(main):036:0> data.force_encoding("binary")
=> "\xC3\xA9\xC3\xA9"
irb(main):037:0> data.encoding
=> #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>
irb(main):038:0> data.force_encoding(:binary)
TypeError: can't convert Symbol into String
	from (irb):38:in `force_encoding'
	from (irb):38
	from /usr/local/bin/irb19:12:in `<main>'