From: Ammar Ali <ammarabuali@...>
Date: 2010-11-11T07:34:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Short question about encoding.

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 12:01 AM, Gabriel Lichard <poopsmith@lavabit.com> wrote:
> Hello everybody at the Ruby Forums!
>
> After getting more into Ruby I stumbled across a little problem: how
> would I go about making a string with a "square root" sign (√) inside
> it, so that it gets encoded in UTF-8 and so that I can later save it in
> a file?
>
> Also, I read that Ruby does have encoding-related issues, so, if that's
> the case, I can probably live without the "square root" sign.
>
> puts "√".encode("UTF-8") # converts it into a "v"
> puts "√"                 # -//-
> puts "√".force_encoding("UTF-8") # -//-
>
> Any ideas, please?

One possibility is using the hex codes for that code point, like:

"\xE2\x88\x9A"

There is also a unicode escape, \u. For more information, take a look at:

  http://ruby.runpaint.org/strings#escapes-summary

HTH,
Ammar