From: Garance A Drosehn Date: 2010-11-28T08:05:59+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8 vs 1.9 On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 11:07 AM, James Edward Gray II wrote: > On Nov 24, 2010, at 9:47 AM, Phillip Gawlowski wrote: >> >> Convert your strings to UTF-8 at all times, and you are done. You have >> to check for data integrity anyway, so you can do that in one go. > > Thank you for being the voice of reason. > > I've fought against Brian enough in the past over this issue, that I try to stay out of it these days.  However, his arguments always strike me as wanting to unlearn what we have learned about encodings. > > We can't go back.  Different encodings exist.  At least Ruby 1.9 allows us to work with them. My experience with 1.9 so far is that some of my ruby scripts have become much faster.  I have other scripts which have needed to deal with a much wider range of characters than "standard ascii".  I got those string-related scripts working fine in 1.8.  They all seem to break in 1.9. In my own opinion, the problem isn't 1.9, is that I wrote these string-handling scripts in ruby before ruby really supported all the characters I had to deal with.  I look forward to getting my scripts switched over to 1.9, but there's no question that *getting* to 1.9 is going to require a bunch of work from me.  That's just the way it is. Not the fault of ruby 1.9, but it's still some work to fix the scripts. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn     =             drosihn@gmail.com Senior Systems Programmer Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA