From: Paul Battley <pbattley@...>
Date: 2006-10-17T17:58:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Edit Distance at Wikipedia

On 17/10/06, Dido Sevilla <dido.sevilla@gmail.com> wrote:
> The code makes that assumption, correct or not. If you're one of those
> ignorant yokels who believes that characters are bytes, it's also a
> safe assumption. ;) Now, if you're one of those people who does i18n,
> l10n, and m17n before breakfast, you'll have alarm bells going off
> inside your head immediately, as such assumptions are in general very
> dangerous to make. A cardinal rule in this kind of programming is that
> strings are meaningless without an attached encoding.

<blatant plug>

The version of Levenshtein in the Text project
(http://rubyforge.org/projects/text) will work on either UTF-8
codepoints or bytes depending on the value of $KCODE. It's the best we
can do for now; in the future, of course, we will be able to decide
based on the strings' encodings themselves.

</blatant plug>

Paul.