[ruby-core:39494] Re: File::BINARY does not behave as advertised

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 18:19, Cameron Pope <[e-mail]> wrote:
> It took me a few minutes to twist my brain around what you're saying,
> but that makes sense. In my mind I was equating 'Binary' with 'not
> transforming any data when writing'.

Yeah, the documentation could probably use clarification there, with
respect to who the "binary" option is an instruction to (the OS or
Ruby or both).

> What seems to be happening is that the file's encoding is marked to
> the external encoding if both the internal and external encodings are
> set. Otherwise it will use the default internal encoding.

That makes sense. If the user has expressed an explicit external
encoding preference use that; else use the internal encoding
preference; else ...

>> ...so I think this is the buggy behavior. It looks as if 'w+b' always
>> results in ASCII-8BIT external encoding, whatever the value of
>> Encoding.default_external.
>
> I'm not sure that's buggy - it's at least consistent with what the
> documentation for IO says:
>
> =C2=A0Binary file mode (may appear with any of the key letters listed abo=
ve).
> =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 | =C2=A0Suppresses EOL <-> CRLF conversion on Window=
s. And
> =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 | =C2=A0sets external encoding to ASCII-8BIT unless =
explicitly
> =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 | =C2=A0specified.

OK, if that's the documented behavior (I confess that I didn't look)
then it's behaving as documented, so I don't think there's a bug.

Presumably that's the intended behavior for back-compatibility reasons.


mathew
--=20
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