From: Axel Etzold <AEtzold@...>
Date: 2007-11-04T19:09:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode illegal characters problem


-------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 17:06:38 +0900
> Von: 7stud -- <bbxx789_05ss@yahoo.com>
> An: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
> Betreff: Re: Unicode illegal characters problem

> Axel Etzold wrote:
> >
> > With respect to the code you sent me, I
> > get:
> > 
> > require 'iconv'
> > 
> > s = "caf\xc3\xa9" #(having removed underscores)
> >
> 
> First of all, even posting messages about unicode is hard to do because 
> you have no idea what the other person is seeing.  For instance, when 
> you say 'I see this output:
> 
> caf�

Dear 7stud,

> 
> you have no idea how my display device is displaying those characters, 
> and I have no idea how your display device is displaying those 
> characters.  Does your display device not understand the encoding so 
> there is a question mark at the end: caf?, and my display device does 
> understand the encoding, so I see an 'e' with acute'? Or, do you see an 
> 'e' with acute, but I see a question mark?  You just can't be sure what 
> the other person is seeing.  I used underscores intermingled with my 
> character encodings to prevent *any* display device from rendering them. 
> That way anyone reading the code will know exactly what's there.


> 
> As a result, to be clear what's going on, you don't want to be posting:
> 
>  s = "caf\xc3\xa9" #(having removed underscores)
> 


Well thanks for pointing that out, but that's
not a problem here and cannot be, as I just posted some code snippet to tell what I was doing to get that result  -- as it originally came from you, you can't possibly misunderstand it, can you ? 

> You want to leave the underscores in when posting about character 
> encodings.  Of course, when you run the code, you need to remove the 
> underscores.

I am intelligent enough to understand this -- the comment was just
to say that I indeed did remove those underscores. :)

> 
> > 
> > What system are you on ?
> > Mine is Linux OpenSuse 10.2, 64bit, Ruby 1.8.6.
> > If I had your behaviour on my system, this transliteration
> > would provide a nice conversion of the accents to Latex,
> 



> mac os x 10.4.7, pre-installed ruby 1.8.2

So there seems to be some different behaviour of iconv (Ruby
and Linux/Unix) for different OS, independently
from actual or possible rendering issues, which is what Jonathan,
Carlos and I found in our previous discussion.

Nice to know that, nevertheless. :-|

I'd like to say thanks to all of you for your posts.

Best regards,

Axel 
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