[ruby-core:20679] Re: 1.9 character encoding (was: encoding of symbols)

Hi,

Just to answer a couple of your concerns:

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 06:22:28PM +0900, Daniel Cavanagh wrote:

> i was taking that to mean that ruby will not be doing automatic  
> conversion
> to one encoding. perhaps he just meant by default and that the option is
> there if wanted

Yep, that's what I meant.
I understand that the people who deal with Japanese & Chinese encodings  
have certain requirements that could break if Ruby did automatic  
transcoding. The compromise was that no transcoding happen by default  
(which keeps these people and those doing non m17n applications happy),  
and to set "default_internal" to enable transcoding on I/O for those  
people who are doing m17n.

On Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:41:29 +1100, <[e-mail]> wrote:

> that doesn't read based on characters though. i meant read(1) would read
> one whole character, no matter the number of bytes.

Yes IO#read is byte-oriented.
If you want to do character input use IO#getc & gets. Note that gets has a  
"limit" parameter which, although it's a number of bytes, never splits a  
multi-byte character.
To my knowledge there is no was of reading N characters, other than  
looping thru "getc" or "each_char". Perhaps there should be. It is  
probably too late to change the "limit" in IO#gets to mean characters.  
Perhaps a character count on IO#getc might be an idea?

Cheers,
Mike.