From: Martin Hess <martinhess@...>
Date: 2009-06-24T01:43:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Multibyte and Gems

So is it considered best practice to put an encoding comment at the  
begging of all your files now days? Such as:

	 # encoding: utf-8

or whatever encoding you like. is this what people are doing or are  
they doing it one off for the files that have non-ascii characters?

It seems to me that if you have a modern editor it isn't too hard to  
accidentally slip in some non-ascii characters resulting in some pain  
down the road.


On Jun 23, 2009, at 12:25 AM, Eric Hodel wrote:

> On Jun 22, 2009, at 22:26, Martin Hess wrote:
>> I've tracked down a problem with a Gem I am trying to use. It turns  
>> out that it has some non-ascii characters in it; for example the  
>> second quote in the regular expression below is not an ASCII  
>> character:
>>
>>   parts = self.split( %r/( [:.;?!][ ] | (?:[ ]|^)["“] )/x )
>>
>> It produces errors like this:
>>
>> 	:in `require': /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/webby-0.9.4/ 
>> lib/webby/core_ext/string.rb:14: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)  
>> (SyntaxError)
>>
>> I fixed it by adding the following to the top of the offending file:
>>
>> 	# encoding: utf-8
>>
>> My questions:
>>
>> * Is this the preferred fix?
>
> Yes.
>
>> * Is there a way to work around this problem without modifying the  
>> Gem?
>
> File a bug with the author and have them release a new version,  
> otherwise no.
>
>> * Is there an easy way to see if gems have non-ascii source files  
>> but haven't included an encoding comment? Some kind of Ruby warning  
>> for instance.
>
> ruby -c will do this for you.
>
>