From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2009-07-09T02:00:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8 - character encoding


From: "James Gray" <james@grayproductions.net>
> On Jul 8, 2009, at 11:42 AM, Thomas Thomassen wrote:
> > Windows' NTFS format supports UTF-16 encoding - would it work if I
> > transcoded the strings from UTF-8 to UTF-16?
>
> I think it depends on which API methods you call, so I'm guessing you  cannot do this.  I think Ruby would need to be changed to 
> use those  methods first.
>
> > I'm trying to avoid transcoding to a 8bit only encoding as that'll  just
> > cause grief when I encounter characters outside the range.
>
> Have you had a look at Ruby 1.9 yet?  I'm wondering if this issue has  been improved there, using the new encoding support.  I 
> don't know  that it has.  I'm more just wondering out-loud…

It's only begun to improve as of the ruby 1.9.2 development version.
(1.9.1 and earlier use the 8-bit windows file API routines.)

This ruby-core post provides a partial list of methods in 1.9.2dev
which now work with windows unicode paths, as of
1.9.2dev (2009-06-24) [i386-mswin32_71]

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/24010


Regards,

Bill