[ruby-core:30697] [Bug #3418] IO#putc Clobbers Multi-byte Characters

Bug #3418: IO#putc Clobbers Multi-byte Characters
http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/3418

Author: Run Paint Run Run
Status: Open, Priority: Normal
Category: M17N, Target version: 1.9.x
ruby -v: ruby 1.9.3dev (2010-06-08 trunk 28202) [i686-linux]

IO#putc claims to write a "character", when in fact it writes a byte. I assume this is for backward compatibility reasons, but as this could lead to data loss, the documentation needs clarifying. Currently, #putc doesn't require the stream to be in binmode, provide any warning of the truncation, or agree with IO#getc on the definition of "character".

  open('/tmp/putc', 'w+')   {|f| f.putc "\u1234"; f.rewind; f.read}
  #=> "\xE1
  >> open('/tmp/getc', 'w+'){|f| f.print "\u1234"; f.rewind; f.getc}
  #=> "瘉エ"

If the IO stream explicitly specifies a non-BINARY encoding, the first example fails with an Encoding::UndefinedConversionError, which is reasonable.

  open('/tmp/putc', 'w+:UTF-8'){|f| f.putc "\u1234"; f.rewind; f.read}
  #=> Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: "\xE1" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8


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