From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2010-12-17T03:17:54+09:00
Subject: Re: do your bit for my mental health - how to find the difference between two strings?

Iain Barnett wrote in post #968894:
>>    service = params[:service]
>>    service.replace('servicename')    # <<<<
>>    STDERR.puts service.inspect, service.encoding
>>    mymethod( service )
>>
>> Try running this with the marked line present, and with that line
>> commented out.
>
> this bore some info. I'm running Ruby 1.92 (sorry, I should have
> mentioned that) with Sinatra 1.1.0. With the replace function the
> encoding is US-ASCII, or UTF-8 if I set the `# encoding: utf-8` at the
> top of the file.
>
> Without the replace function the encoding is ASCII-8BIT. I've been
> searching around for how to make all this work now I know this, and
> poking around in the Sinatra and Rack source, but haven't found a
> (working) answer yet. I'll post it when I do.

OK, well you should now be able replicate this without Sinatra:

foo = "servicename"
foo.force_encoding("ASCII-8BIT")
mymethod(foo)

Note that Sinatra gives you a parameter tagged as ASCII-8BIT, more or 
less by accident (i.e. it's not documented as far as I know); it's 
simply that Ruby defaults to ASCII-8BIT when reading data from a socket, 
as opposed to from a file.

If you really want the gorey details, I attempted to document about 200 
ruby 1.9 string behaviours at 
https://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/string19.rb

Anyway, you can now investigate what's going on in mymethod() which 
might be affected by the encoding. If you are using sqlite3 inside that 
method, you may have hit upon the bug already discovered at
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/476119

If you don't want to understand what's going on, you can do
service.force_encoding("UTF-8")
and cross your fingers. It might fix the problem, or it might be hiding 
some other more serious problem which will explode on you at some 
indeterminate time in the future.

But as far as I'm concerned, this is all total crap. I stick with ruby 
1.8 for exactly this reason.

-- 
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