From: gabriele renzi <surrender_it@...>
Date: 2005-11-09T05:22:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Investigating Ruby - key limitations ?

Austin Ziegler ha scritto:

> Just saying you want "First-class Unicode Support" is nonsense. Ruby's
> strings *are not* any Unicode encoding. At the same time, they're not
> ISO-8859-1 encoding, either. Ruby's strings are -- in many ways -- what
> other languages might call a ByteVector. In Ruby 2.0, Matz has indicated
> that Ruby's strings will carry around an encoding flag that explicitly
> indicates how they should be interpreted. This is, in fact, far
> *superior* to what Java and Python do -- which are limited to UTF-8
> string representations (AFAIK). 


I don't recall how java handles encodings (apart that it should be using 
utf-16) but I can assure you that python is not limited to utf8 strings, 
it has objects of class "unicode" which are like arrays of codepoints 
and it ships transformation tables from  an encoding to another.
Actually, ruby is borrowing something from it (the ugly encoding header :)

  For the rest, I agree that it would be better for the OP to clearly 
analize what he needs since probably ruby+uconv could be enough.