From: Stefan Lang <perfectly.normal.hacker@...>
Date: 2009-02-03T04:25:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Question on reading text files in Windows

2009/2/2 Stefan Lang <perfectly.normal.hacker@gmail.com>:
> 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.

Sorry, I meant to say "Try to convert the string to UTF-8 WITH Iconv"

Stefan