[ruby-core:35188] Re: [Ruby 1.9-Bug#4386][Feedback] encoding: directive does not affect regex expressions

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 6:47 PM, Usaku NAKAMURA <[e-mail]> wrote:
> IMHO, the US-ASCII fallback of regexp literals is a spec bug of ruby.
> The encoding of regexp literals should be the same as script encoding, like string literals.

I found it unusual until we started digging into regexp parsing logic
for JRuby. As far as I can tell, the change to US-ASCII is a very
explicit decision, to allow the widest-possible functionality for a
regexp that only needs to match 7-bit ASCII text. Limiting it to only
the encoding specified for the file would mean ASCII-only regexps
could not (necessarily) be used to match a variety of other encodings,
even though logically they'd match just fine.

- Charlie