From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-03-21T00:19:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby UTF-8

Nikolai Weibull wrote:

>>>I'm working with Japanese character sets in Windows. I can save my
>>>*.rb files with notepad using UTF-8 but I can't run them with Ruby.
> 
>>The Windows-Editor writes always a "Byte Order Mark" (BOM) at the
>>beginning of UTF-8/16LE/16BE coded files. In this case a UTF-8 coded
>>file begins with "EF BB BF" (hex). These non-characters should usually
>>be ignored (for more information see http://www.unicode.org/).
> 
> Why does it write a BOM for UTF-8 encoded files?  It's utterly
> meaningless to discuss byte order for UTF-8 encoded text,

So that it can identify the file as UTF-8 encoded in the future without 
having to guess based on byte count, I assume.

I think that that behavior makes sense and would like to see it 
supported in Ruby.