From: Stefan Schmiedl <s@...>
Date: 2007-03-04T02:35:12+09:00
Subject: ruby, irb and iconv with translit

Greetings.

I've been trying to find out why sorting a list of German names failed on
both my local Gentoo box and my remote Debian server. Can somebody please
explain the following in simple words?

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25 patchlevel 12) [x86_64-linux]
$ irb -v
irb 0.9.5(05/04/13)


$ cat test.rb | irb
>> $KCODE='u'
=> "u"
>> require "iconv"
=> true
>> $conv  = Iconv.new("ASCII//TRANSLIT", "UTF-8")
=> #<Iconv:0x2ace62d57090>
>> $arg = "辰rger"
=> "辰rger"
>> $asc = $conv.iconv($arg)
=> "?rger"
>> puts $asc.size
5

ok, translit fails. This might be a bug somewhere,
but then why does the following work, where I called
iconv interactively, but with the same string?

$ irb -r test.rb
5
>> watch_this = $conv.iconv($arg)
=> "aerger"
>> watch_this.size
=> 6


Thanks,
s.