From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2009-12-20T00:39:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.9 - US-ASCII vs UTF-8

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 6:39 AM, Petri Kivikangas <wallu667@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I have source files that contain unicode chars. Do I really have to
> put "# encoding: utf-8" at the beginning of every one of these files, or
> can I somehow make ruby treat all files by default as utf-8? If I can,
> does the change of default encoding from US-ASCII to UTF-8 make my
> programs much slower?

No, you can't override the source encoding.  You can use flags to set
the default internal / external encodings via locale (or flag), and
ruby -e will use your locale as the source encoding, but last I
checked, you need the magic comments to determine source encoding.

The main reason here is for portability.   Otherwise, you could easily
(by accident) write Ruby programs that only run in your environment.

-greg