From: MonkeeSage <MonkeeSage@...>
Date: 2007-12-07T10:09:59+09:00
Subject: Re: UTF-8 and printf

On Dec 6, 6:54 pm, Jose <jld...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 dic, 14:58, MonkeeSage <MonkeeS...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately, I think you'll have to use something ugly like this...
>
> > def pad(n, s)
> >   (" " * (n - s.unpack("U*").length)) + s
> > end
> >  [...]
>
> Hey, thank you very much. The trick of unpack to find the string
> length is a nice one. And s.unpack("U*").length is only 4 times slower
> than s.length, according to my benchmarks.
>
> Anybody knows this printf "bug" will be solved in ruby 1.9?
>
> Regards,
> --Jose

Not really a bug, just that 1.8 doesn't have native unicode support.
But, yes, in ruby 1.9 you have a native utf-8 type, so with default
utf-8 encoding, printf Just Works (you can also force utf-8 encoding
with String#force_encoding if you're using a different native
encoding, and printf does the right thing). :)

Regards,
Jordan