From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2009-09-02T19:08:49+09:00
Subject: Re: how to convert string to binary and back in Ruby 1.9?

I think I understand it now. The following was confusing me initially:

    >> str = "über"
    => "über"
    >> str.force_encoding("ISO-8859-1")
    => "über"
    >> str = "groß"
    => "groß"
    >> str.force_encoding("ISO-8859-1")
    => "gro�\x9F"

It appears this is just an artefact of String#inspect. String#inspect 
"knows" that \x80 to \x9F are not printable characters in ISO-8859-1, so 
converts them to the backslash hex form. This breaks the UTF-8 display 
by splitting the character, but of course only for strings which contain 
bytes in that range.

You still get the string displayed as UTF-8 using puts without inspect:

    >> puts str
    groß
    => nil

It works if you set the encoding for STDOUT inside irb, in which case 
you'll get everything transcoded to your terminal's character set.

>> STDOUT.set_encoding "locale"
=> #<IO:<STDOUT>>
>> str = "über"
=> "über"
>> str.force_encoding("ISO-8859-1")
=> "über"
>> puts str
über
=> nil
>> 
-- 
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