From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-10-19T09:59:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Bitwise operations

On 10/18/06, David Vallner <david@vallner.net> wrote:
> Gavin Kistner wrote:
> > Strings in Ruby are, as you say, series of 8-bit bytes. The String#[]
> > operator when called with a single integer index returns the numeric
> > value of the requested byte:
> Reputedly about to change in Ruby 2, indexing a String will return a
> single-character string. I think there'll be some more clean separation
> between methods operating on a String as a (possibly Unicode) text
> string or as binary data. I'm still personally not quite happy with the
> semantics of Strings being overloaded like this, but it's probably the
> most compatible way.

Fortunately, it will be controlled where the encoding of the binary
blob that is the string is treated as a view on the data. Thus, when
the encoding is UTF-8, Ruby will try to interpret the characters
according to UTF-8 rules. When the encoding is none (or raw, or
something), Ruby won't try to interpret the characters at all.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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