From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2004-12-14T16:49:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode in Ruby and a Ruby Reference

Hi,

In message "Re: Unicode in Ruby and a Ruby Reference"
    on Tue, 14 Dec 2004 16:33:17 +0900, Mike McGavin <iizogii@gmail.com> writes:

|1.  I was wondering what the state is of Ruby and support for Unicode?
| For instance, I'm coming mostly from Python which has a special
|Unicode type that can be translated to various encodings on request. 
|I can't seem to find anything similar in Ruby.  Does it exist
|anywhere, or is it standard to deal with Unicode in a completely
|different way, or is it something that hasn't been developed at this
|point?

Handing Unicode (UTF-8) is OK.  Ruby's strings can contain any
sequence of bytes.  Regex engine is aware of UTF-8 so that you can
use pattern match against Unicode characters.  For encoding
conversion, iconv library is your friend.

This is weaker than Python, but does most of the jobs.  We are working
on M17N Ruby (M17N stands for multilingualization), in which you can
handle many encodings (e.g. UTF-8, UTF-16, Big5, GBK, and much more)
without conversion.

							matz.