From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-12-16T00:20:11+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby 1.9.1: Encoding trouble: broken US-ASCII String

On Dec 15, 2008, at 9:07 AM, Tom Link wrote:

>> There's a lot going on here, so it's a lot to take in.  In places,  
>> the
>> behavior is a little complex.  However, the core team has put a lot  
>> of
>> effort into making the system easier to use.  It's getting there.
>
> It would have been nice though if the defaults had been chosen so that
> they don't break 1.8 scripts -- or use some 8bit clean encoding if the
> data contains 8bit wide characters instead of throwing an error.

I think it's probably more important to get this encoding interface  
right than to worry about 1.8 compatibility.  We knew 1.9 was going to  
break some things, so the time was right.

Also, if you've been using the -KU switch in Ruby 1.8 and working with  
UTF-8 data, 1.9 may work pretty well for you:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/19552

That's a pretty common "best practice" in the Ruby community, from  
what I've seen.  Even Rails pushes this approach now.

If you have gone this way though, you may want to migrate to the even  
better -U switch in 1.9.

James Edward Gray II