From: A LeDonne <aledonne.listmail@...>
Date: 2006-01-13T01:31:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Dir.entires and UTF-8

On 1/12/06, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@ruby-lang.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 1/13/06, Timo Hoepfner <th-dev@onlinehome.de> wrote:
>
> > What's going on here? Ths is on MacOS X 10.4.4. Looks like
> > Dir#entries returns strings encoded with some encoding I didn't
> > expect. How can I convert the string to UTF8?
>
> You have got a corrent UTF-8 string.  Unlike Windows XP, Mac OS X
> decomposes character components as much as possible (Sorry I forgot
> the correct term for this policy).  So what you got:
>
> > # => ["a", "", "o", "", "u", "", "�", "A", "", "O", "", "U", ""]
>
> is decomposed form of your string, a+umlaut, o+umlaut, etc.
>
> matz.
>

Matz refers to Unicode Normalization Form D (NFD). According to
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html (HFS Plus Volume
Format):

"HFS Plus stores strings fully decomposed and in canonical order. HFS
Plus compares strings in a case-insensitive fashion. Strings may
contain Unicode characters that must be ignored by this comparison.
For more details on these subtleties, see Unicode Subtleties."

-A