From: Tanaka Akira <akr@...>
Date: 2009-02-15T20:43:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:22146] Re: [Feature #908] Should be an easy way of 	reading N characters from am I/O stream

In article <a5d587fb0902141711q780f0d24jef9be9b8bbe69b2a@mail.gmail.com>,
  Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz> writes:

>> For example, zip code or some fixed numbering system is
>> fixed length but multibyte encoding is not useful.
>
> Let's make it more general - what about the first N characters or first N lines?
>
> I'm sure you can understand this is useful.

I think I don't understand the usefulness until an actual
example is shown.

> If a method like head(N) was implemented on it would it leave the IO
> pointing to the text after the first N records, be it chars, lines, or
> anything else?

What is represented by the N chars?
-- 
Tanaka Akira