From: Michael Fellinger <m.fellinger@...>
Date: 2009-02-24T10:15:04+09:00
Subject: Re: why does . match non-ascii chars?

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:34 AM, 7stud -- <bbxx789_05ss@yahoo.com> wrote:
> str = "abcdéf "
>
> result = str.gsub(/./n) do |match|
>  puts "%%%02X" % match[0]
> end
> puts
>
>
> --output:--
> %61
> %62
> %63
> %64
> %C3
> %A9
> %66
>
>
> Doesn't the 'n' option say to match ascii?   For what it's worth, I get
> the same result without the 'n' option.

The default switch of a regex is actually 'n' already, that only
changes if you set $KCODE before.
It has little influence on what is matched when it comes to '.', but
it influences how the matched bytes will be grouped to resemble
characters.

sigma ~ % ruby -e 'p "abcdéf ".scan(/./)'
["a", "b", "c", "d", "\303", "\251", "f", " "]

sigma ~ % ruby -e 'p "abcdéf ".scan(/./u)'
["a", "b", "c", "d", "\303\251", "f", " "]

sigma ~ % ruby -Kue 'p "abcdéf ".scan(/./u)'
["a", "b", "c", "d", "é", "f", " "]

sigma ~ % ruby19 -e 'p "abcdéf ".scan(/./)'
["a", "b", "c", "d", "é", "f", " "]

Please see some excellent articles about this topic from James Edward Gray II:

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/bytes_and_characters_in_ruby_18
http://blog.grayproductions.net/categories/character_encodings

^ manveru