From: Stefan Lang <perfectly.normal.hacker@...>
Date: 2009-02-03T04:09:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Question on reading text files in Windows

2009/2/2 Jim Knowlton <jknowlton525@gmail.com>:
> I am running Ruby 1.86 on Windows, and having trouble reading in some
> text files.  For some text files, if I do something simple like:
>
> myfile = File.open("logfile.log")
> contents = myfile.read()
> puts contents
>
> I get each character seperated by a space, such as:
>
> ”= = =   V e r b o s e   l o g g i n g   s t a r t e d :   1 / 2 8 / 2
> 0 0 9
>  1 3 : 4 5 : 0 6     B u i l d   t y p e :   S H I P   U N I C O D E
>
> If I bring up the file in even a bare-bones editor (such as VIM), I
> get the file as it normally is (without any extraneous spaces).  Does
> anyone know why this would be, or how I can work around it?  It's
> causing issues as I am trying to write a script to search for a
> particular string of text, and obviously it isn't found, even though
> it should be.

The file is probably UTF-16 encoded and starts with a BOM.
Try to convert the string to UTF-8, or switch to Ruby 1.9.

Stefan