From: Stefan Schmiedl <s@...>
Date: 2007-03-04T04:50:12+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby, irb and iconv with translit

On Sat, 03 Mar 2007 18:47:44 +0100, Stefan Schmiedl wrote:

>> 
>> 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?
>> 

The folks at #ruby-de helped me out with some brain waves and the
problem originates with locale settings. To wit:

$ echo ��rger | LC_CTYPE=de iconv -f utf8 -t ascii//translit
?rger
$ echo ��rger | LC_CTYPE=de_DE iconv -f utf8 -t ascii//translit
AErger

But while you can get the iconv tool to behave by setting LC_CTYPE,
there's no such luck with ruby:

$ LC_CTYPE=C ruby test.rb 
"?rger"
$ LC_CTYPE=de_DE ruby test.rb 
"?rger"

For the record, test.rb (saved as utf8) looks like:

$KCODE='u'
require "iconv"
$conv  = Iconv.new("ASCII//TRANSLIT", "UTF-8")
p($conv.iconv("��rger"))

s.