From: Phillip Hutchings <sitharus@...>
Date: 2006-06-23T05:57:59+09:00
Subject: Re: ascii representation of unicode string?

On 6/23/06, darren kirby <bulliver@badcomputer.org> wrote:
> Hello all.
>
> I am unpacking some unicode strings from a binary file. I have a string like:
>
> "W\000M\000/\000T\000r\000a\000c\000k\000N\000u\000m\000b\000e\000r\000\000\000\003"
>
> and I need to turn it into:
>
> "WM/TrackNumber"
>
> When I 'puts' the string it prints fine but I need to assign it to a variable,
> and when I try something like:
>
> require 'jcode'
> $KCODE = 'UTF8'
> s.each_char { |ch| print ch }
>
> it will print each char but return the original unicode string. And when I
> try:
>
> n = ""
> s.each_char { |ch| n += ch }
>
> The entire unicode char is being added to n.
>
> So can I extract an ascii representation of this string? I will admit I don't
> know the first thing about unicode and I may be totally lost here...
>
> Thanks for consideration.

That's not UTF-8, that's UTF-16 little endian without a BOM. If you
know the string is pure ASCII, just UTF-16 encoded you can just do
s.gsub(/\000/,''), but this will break any non-7bit characters.

-- 
Phillip Hutchings
http://www.sitharus.com/