From: "NARUSE, Yui" <naruse@...>
Date: 2010-09-01T01:54:19+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:31973] Re: not use system for default encoding

(2010/08/31 0:04), Roger Pack wrote:
> It strikes me as a bit "scary" to use system locale settings to
> *arbitrarily* set Encoding.default_external
>
> For example, I develop on windows (def: IBM437).
> This means that if I want this to work cross platform I have to
> specify IBM437 for every File.read (et al) that I use in my library.
> So it is a bit scary.
>
> Suggestion: default to UTF-8 *no matter where* then allow the user to
> change it if they want something else.
> Or even default to BINARY (ASCII-8BIT) unless they specify.  Most
> users don't want/need encoding until they run into it--they can handle
> it then.
> Thoughts?
> Thanks!
> -r

Japanese version of Windows uses CP932 (a.k.a. SJIS or Windows-31J).
And its command prompt uses CP932; it's not UTF-8 and can't use UTF-8.
So we must follow locale information.
(almost always locale reflects terminal's encoding)

-- 
NARUSE, Yui  <naruse@airemix.jp>