From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2010-04-19T16:42:18+09:00
Subject: Re: iconv transfer code

Benoit Daloze wrote:
> The easiest with File: File.open("myfile.ext", "w:UTF-8")

This is a poor example of the point in question, although a good example 
of how hard ruby 1.9 is to understand.

In fact: the default external encoding is nil for files opened for 
write, and does not depend on the environment at all. That is,

  File.open("myfile.ext","w") { |f| f.puts str }

just outputs whatever bytes are in str, without meddling with them. 
Whereas

  File.open("myfile.ext","w:UTF-8") { |f| f.puts str}

will attempt to re-encode str from its current encoding to UTF-8, and 
may raise an exception if it cannot do so.

So if you want to write programs which don't crash, the first is 
arguably better.

The rules for *reading* from files are completely different, and indeed 
"r:UTF-8" is the right thing to do if you are reading from a file which 
contains UTF-8 text and you don't want this to be affected by 
environment variable magic.
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