From: Daniel Cavanagh <danielcavanagh@...>
Date: 2008-12-18T18:22:28+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20636] Re: 1.9 character encoding (was: encoding of symbols)

> I am against trancoding before comparison.  The applications models
> falls into either:
>
>  * treat single encoding only, say iso-8869-1 (single encoding model)
>  * convert everything Unicode at I/O (universal encoding model)
>  * mix various encoding per strings (multiple encoding model)
>
> Most of the applications use the former two, and mix encoding
> comparison happens only in the last one.  So I don't think we need to
> make comparison more complex than it is now.

comparison would barely become any more complex than it is now. the  
extra code would be pretty much what i wrote in my original email. the  
only complex part is the conversion function and that would immensely  
useful anyway. are there any plans to introduce a simple, native  
function like this (ie. something very unlike iconv ;)

but if you're against late conversion (ie. at comparison and  
concatenation) and you're against early conversion (ie. at I/O), i  
don't think this is going to happen :)

this is still annoying me, though. for instance, why do i have to use / 
u with regexes to match against unicode strings. why do i have to  
specify the type of the regex at all? why do i have to add in checks  
before i have to be sure i can concatenate properly? it's awkward and  
it shouldn't be. it's very un-ruby like