From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2009-12-20T00:41:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.9 - US-ASCII vs UTF-8

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Gregory Brown
<gregory.t.brown@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Sorry, while the above statement is generally true, I forgot about the
special case for UTF-8.  To preserve backwards compatibility:

sandal:~ $ cat x.rb
p __ENCODING__
sandal:~ $ ruby19 -Ku x.rb
#<Encoding:UTF-8>

But I imagine this isn't the recommended approach :)