From: danielcavanagh@...
Date: 2008-12-22T10:36:00+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20774] Re: [Feature #908] Should be an easy way of reading N characters      from am I/O stream

> Feature #908: Should be an easy way of reading N characters from am I/O
> stream
> http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/908
>
> Author: Michael Selig
> Status: Open, Priority: Normal
>
> I know of no way of reading N characters (as opposed to bytes) and
> returning a string other than writing a loop with getc or each_char.
>
> Suggestions - one of:
>
> 1) Change the "limit" paramater on IO#gets to mean characters rather than
> bytes. This would change existing behaviour, so may be unacceptable.
>
> 2) Add an optional "limit" parameter to IO#getc, so IO#getc will read up
> to this many characters

or perhaps a new method IO#readchars/read_chars that matches IO#read, and
then maybe aliasing IO#read to IO#readbytes/read_bytes to keep it
consistent