From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2009-02-16T18:50:36+09:00
Subject: Re: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII (ArgumentError)

Brian Candler wrote:
> Yes. IMO this is a horrendous misfeature of ruby 1.9: it asserts that 
> all external data is text, unless explicitly told otherwise.

And worse: the encoding chosen comes from the environment. So your 
program which you developed on one system and runs correctly there may 
fail totally on another.

I'm not saying that Ruby shouldn't handling encodings and conversions; 
I'm just saying you should ask for them. For example:

   File.open("....", :encoding => "UTF-8")   # Use this encoding
   File.open("....", :encoding => "ENV")     # Follow the environment
   File.open("....")                         # No idea, treat as binary

I'm not going to use 1.9 without wrapper scripts to invoke Ruby with 
appropriate flags to force the external encoding to a fixed value. And 
that's a pain.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.