From: Rik Hemsley <rik@...>
Date: 2001-12-03T16:44:01+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:27330] Unicode string for the standard library ?

Currently I'm faking an Unicode string class by storing UTF-8 in the
standard String class, and using iconv:

require 'iconv'

class String

  def from_latin1
    from_charset('iso-8859-1')
  end

  def from_charset(charset)
    Iconv.iconv('utf-8', charset, self).to_s
  end

  def to_latin1()
    to_charset('iso-8859-1')
  end

  def to_charset(charset)
    Iconv.iconv(charset, 'utf-8', self).to_s
  end

end

(This is probably wrong, but it Works For Me (tm))

I am wondering if anyone else is missing an Unicode string as much as I
am, and if they have ideas/information on what might happen in this
direction in the future.

Rik