From: Tom Link <micathom@...>
Date: 2009-02-04T14:52:05+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:21828] Re: [Bug #1098] Unclear encoding error: #<Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: 	"\xE2\x96\x80" from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 in conversion from CP850 to 	ISO-8859-1>

> First, since we haven't implemented direct conversion path from CP850
> to ISO-8859-1 (yet), Ruby converts strings via UTF-8, hence the
> message. �If you have suggestion for better description, we are open.

I'd suggest some duplication of information:

UndefinedConversionError: "..." from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 in indirect
conversion from CP850 to UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1

or "in indirect conversion from CP850 to ISO-8859-1 via UTF-8"

> Second, I couldn't reproduce the problem from your test script.

Well, the problem was that the input really wasn't CP850 but latin-1
and that the setting LANG to xx_XX.ISO-8859-1 doesn't seem make ruby
set the external encoding properly -- although I had assumed that
http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/956 would make that possible.