From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2006-06-11T19:56:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Which encoding causes fewest problems in Ruby 1.8.2?

On 6/11/06, Jim Smith <nospam@nospam.lan> wrote:
> I posted a similar question in the rails group but this is more specific
> to ruby 1.8.2.
>
> I read that ruby has problems with multibyte charsets.  And I read that
> there might be some problems with ISO-8859-15 related to REXML.  And I
> read that regex might have problems with ISO-8859-1.
>
> Given the above problems (or rumors), which encoding is recommended for
> use with ruby 1.8.2?

None. They all cause problems. With utf-8 most string functions won't
work correctly (probably including regexps). There are special
extensions to work around this to some extent.

ISO-8858-1 and ISO-8859-15 should be pretty much the same. They are
simple 8-bit so the string functions that expect 1-byte characters
work. They won't allow you to use slightly more exotic characters
(like greek letters for maths, ...).

>
> UTF-8
> ISO-8859-1
> ISO-8859-15
>
> I'm certain both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-15 will support all the characters
> I'll ever use.  And ISO-8859-1 only lacks a couple characters I might
> use on very rare occassions so I'm just looking for a charset that will
> cause fewest problems with Ruby.
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
>