From: Lloyd Zusman <ljz@...>
Date: 2004-08-29T11:36:48+09:00
Subject: Trapping errors within unpack?

I'm trying to do a simple conversion between UTF-8 and 8-bit ascii.
The key part of my program goes like this:

  ARGF.each {
    |line|
    puts line.unpack('U*').pack('c*')
  }

This works fine unless the input contains an invalid UTF-8 character
(which sometimes occurs).  In that case, the 'unpack' method terminates
at the offending character, and no more translation takes place.

What I'd like to do is trap errors like that and put some sort of
special character in the output (such as '?') for each invalid UTF-8
character that is encountered, and then continue with the rest of the
input.  However, I don't know how to do that within 'unpack'.

Can anyone suggest a solution?

Thanks in advance.

--
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com
 God bless you.