From: Erik Hollensbe <erik@...>
Date: 2007-06-01T15:25:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 2007-05-31 15:30:50 -0700, "Austin Ziegler" <halostatue@gmail.com> said:

> On 5/31/07, Ivan Mashchenko <ivan.mashchenko@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello, everyone. I am sorry, I was a bit embarassed by the quantity of
>> text in this discussion and I may have read it not enough carefully to
>> firure out the answer, and it (discussion) itself seems to be a year
>> old, so I've decided to ask:
> 
>> Finally, is there a convenient support for Unicode in Ruby? Or, if not,
>> when will it be?
> 
> There are a lot of answers to that question, and I strongly suggest
> you search as this is a hotly debated discussion.
> 
> Google is more useful for searching this than ruby-forum.com. You will
> find out when there will be a new release, and the current state of
> Unicode.

If it helps any, I've moved ~2000 web pages in an internal work project 
that had mixed UTF-8/cp-1252 (in the content, not just between pages) 
and ruby handled it very gracefully. I was using 1.8.5-p12 and Hpricot 
(but not Hpricot's encoding features, which last I checked are broken) 
for the process.

While I'm certainly not an authority on the subject, I've thoroughly 
battle-tested this and it works with a high degree of confidence. 
Certainly better than perl and libxml2, which was our original 
implementation.