From: Paul Battley <pbattley@...>
Date: 2006-06-23T20:31:01+09:00
Subject: Re: ascii representation of unicode string?

On 22/06/06, darren kirby <bulliver@badcomputer.org> wrote:
> 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"
...
> 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...

Here's a reliable way to do it with Iconv:

require 'iconv'
s = "W\000M\000/\000T\000r\000a\000c\000k\000N\000u\000m\000b\000e\000r\000\000\000\003"
ic = Iconv.new("US-ASCII//IGNORE", "UTF-16LE")
p (ic.iconv(s+' '))[0..-2] # => "WM/TrackNumber"

Paul.