From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2008-12-16T01:16:55+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby 1.9.1: Encoding trouble: broken US-ASCII String

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> The whole picture must be complex, since encoding support itself is
> VERY complex indeed.  History sucks.  But for daily use, just remember
> specifying encoding if you are not sure what is the default_encoding,
> e.g.
> 
>   f = open(path, "r:iso-8859-1")

It seems to go against DRY to have to write "r:binary" or "rb:binary" 
when opening lots of binary files. But if I remember to use 
#!/usr/bin/ruby -Knw everywhere that should be OK.

However, I also don't like the unstated assumption that all Strings 
contain text.

In RFC2045 (MIME), there is a distinction made between 7bit text, 8bit 
text, and binary data.

But if you label a string as "binary", Ruby changes this to 
"ASCII-8BIT". I think that is a misrepresentation of that data, if it is 
not actually ASCII-based text. I would much rather it made no assertion 
about the content than a wrong assertion.
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