From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2006-03-14T03:16:54+09:00
Subject: Re: unicode in ruby

Hi,

>> > You say that utf-16 is more space-conserving for languages like
>> > Japanese. Nice. But I do not care. I guess text consumes very small
>> > portion of memory on my system. Both ram and hardrive.  I do not care
>> > if that doubles or quadruples. In the very few cases when I want to
>> > save space (ie when sending email attachments) I can use gzip. It can
>> > even compress repetitive text which no encoding can.
>>
>> If you don't care, then why are you arguing here? The Japanese -- which
>> would include Matz -- *do* care.
> 
> I do not care about the space inefficiency. Be it inefficiency in
> storing Czech text, Japanese text, English text, or any other. It has
> nothing to do with the fact I do not speak Japanese.

I'm writing a cross-platform app in ruby that will include text editing and
also p2p chat.  I'd like to handle extended character sets.  Do we have any
recipies or best practices for handling non-ASCII character encodings
in present-day ruby v1.8.4?

How are folks currently handling non-ASCII "wide" character encodings
in Ruby?


Thanks,

Bill