From: Paul Battley <pbattley@...>
Date: 2006-08-01T00:48:23+09:00
Subject: Re: state of unicode support

On 31/07/06, Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov <listbox@julik.nl> wrote:
> > Ruby itself also understands UTF-8 regular expressions to a
> > degree.  Using the
> > 'u' modifier.  Many Ruby-based UTF-8 hacks are based on the idea of:
> > str.scan(/./u), which returns an array of strings, each string
> > containing a
> > multibyte character. (Also: str.unpack('U*').)
>
> Which is actually useless because this breaks your string between
> codepoints, not between characters. ICU4R currently resolves this, as
> well as a library posted
> on ruby-talk a while ago (with proper text boudnary handling).

Whilst it's certainly useless for a lot of tasks, I'm not sure that
Ruby is any worse than other languages in this regard. As far as I'm
aware, most languages that 'support' Unicode don't handle grapheme
clusters without using additional libraries.

> I, for one, am very saddened every time the topic comes up ecause i'm
> sick of the brokenness (I actually start looking at these Other
> Languages and Other Frameworks that take l10n and i18n seriously).

Actually, that's a really good idea. Which languages/frameworks have
you found that actually do it right? We could learn from their
example.

Paul.