From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2009-07-09T03:29:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8 - character encoding


From: "Bill Kelly" <billk@cts.com>
> From: "Thomas Thomassen" <thomas@thomthom.net>
>> Andd, I also don't know what would happen for an eastern user. I'm 
>> wondering if the IO functions would assume a different 8bit encoding...
> 
> For best 8-bit compatibility you'll want to encode to Windows1252.

Hmm, I take it back; even for 8-bit it appears slightly more complicated
on windows...

Apparently depending on AreFileApisANSI() one would encode to
GetACP() vs. GetOEMCP()

Ruby 1.9.1 is smart enough to handle this automatically (see:
rb_filesystem_encoding() in encoding.c)

But anyway this is all still referring to 8-bit code pages and still won't
help for chinese (etc.) characters anyway...

 * * * 

So, again, if you absolutely need to handle unicode paths on
windows prior to ruby 1.9.2, and you don't have the option of 
writing your own ruby C extension, the I think trying to call
wide-character functions like _wopen() via ruby's Win32API
module may be the only option.   :(


Regards,

Bill