From: Marco <m@...>
Date: 2008-09-16T16:47:44+09:00
Subject: get a portion of a utf8 encoded string

hi all.

ruby 1.8.5 (2006-08-25) [i386-linux]

 >> puts 'hällo'
hällo
=> nil
 >> puts 'hällo'[0, 2]
h▒
=> nil
 >> puts 'hällo'[0, 3]
hä
=> nil
 >> require 'iconv'
=> true
 >> puts 'hällo'[0, 3]
hä
=> nil
 >> puts 'hällo'[0, 2]
h▒
=> nil
 >>


The ä character is probably 2 bytes long, so puts 'hällo'[1, 1] returns 
only a "pice" of the ä character. Is there a way to make this work?
'hällo'[0, 2] should return -> hä
and
'hällo'[0, 3] should return -> häl

thanks