From: mortee <mortee.lists@...>
Date: 2007-10-31T04:57:53+09:00
Subject: Re: to_yaml and international characters

Jamal Bengeloun wrote:
> Probably. I am a beginner in ruby.
> 
> The program gets the accented characters from a dBaseIV file, a MS 
> Access File and some YAML files.
> 
> I use Komodo Edit as my editor and it does handle UTF-8 correctly.
> 
> I know! That's why I did not understand why I got \202. I do not know 
> which charset ruby uses to convert the characters. 

When converting some accented characters to \nnn then it doesn't use any
encoding. It just represents the verbatim non-ascii bytes it sees in the
string it gets. Encodig/decoding happens mainly when you input accented
chars on your keyboard, and they get converted to some byte (-sequence)
to be stored in a string, and when those strings are displayed, and they
are converted back to some printable characters.

Problems arise when the displaying code interprets the same string
according to a different charset than what it was encoded according to.

For example, when you puts a string in irb, then it's your terminal's
current charset which determines how the bytes in the string are
actually displayed. In contrast, when you use p (or, for that matter,
inspect), then non-ascii characters get ascaped as \nnn.

mortee