From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-03-25T04:34:48+09:00
Subject: Re: UTF8

Peter C 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. 
> This is what happens when I try to run it. 
> 
> c:\> ruby -Ku myFile.rb 
> jpn.rb:1: undefined method `&#8745;&#9559;&#9488;' for main:Object 
> (NoMethodError) 
> 
> Am I doing something wrong? 

I guess you're running into the same old BOM issue. Notepad and other 
editors put a special marker at the beginning of documents. Ruby parses 
that either as a variable or method name. You can work around it by 
starting your application with an assignment:

nothing_useful = nil

Ruby will then parse it as an assignment to a variable that starts with 
the BOM and ends with 'nothing_useful'.

It's a reported problem and I hope that Ruby will do this the correct 
way and just ignore the BOM in the future...