[ruby-core:33217] Re: not use system for default encoding

On 31 Aug 2010, at 09:54, NARUSE, Yui wrote:

> (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)

I think the biggest problem that is a real issue in this discussion is that irb crashes in unicode terminals on windows:

cmd /u
chcp 65001
ruby -e "puts Encoding.default_external"
UTF-8
irb # => crash

IRB has other bugs in this area, for example, irb assumes UTF-8 in all cases and doesn't use Encoding defaults.

192p0 mingw