From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2010-04-19T17:31:24+09:00
Subject: Re: iconv transfer code

botp wrote:
>> So if you want to write programs which don't crash, the first is
>> arguably better.
> 
> we disagree there but what do you mean by "crash"?

I mean "raise an exception". The first example I wrote will never raise 
an exception. The second can.

Code to demonstrate:

  str = "\xff"
  File.open("out1","w") { |f| f.puts str }
  File.open("out2","w:UTF-8") { |f| f.puts str }

Line 2 will never raise an exception, regardless of the content or the 
encoding of str, and regardless of environment variable settings. It 
just writes the string to the file.

Line 3 may raise an exception. It does in this particular program 
because str has data tagged as ASCII-8BIT which cannot be transcoded to 
UTF-8.
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