From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2011-01-13T07:35:15+09:00
Subject: Re: String.strip with UTF-8

On Wednesday, January 12, 2011 03:28:38 pm Erik E. wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I can't strip the leading whitespace (or what at least looks like
> whitespace) from a Ruby 1.9.2 string
> 
> 
> ruby-1.9.2-p0 :002 > d.entity
>  => " United Arab Emirates"
> ruby-1.9.2-p0 :003 > d.entity.strip
>  => " United Arab Emirates"
> ruby-1.9.2-p0 :004 > d.entity.class
>  => String
> ruby-1.9.2-p0 :005 > d.entity.encoding
>  => #<Encoding:UTF-8>
> ruby-1.9.2-p0 :006 >
> 
> It's inside the Rails 3.0.3 console..

Try this:

d.entity[0].ord

I'm not sure how useful that will be, but you can compare it to that of a 
space. It _seems_ to be unicode-aware:

ruby-1.9.2-p136 :020 > '☃'.ord
 => 9731 
ruby-1.9.2-p136 :021 > _.to_s 16
 => "2603" 
ruby-1.9.2-p136 :022 > "\u2603"
 => "☃" 

And for good measure:

ruby-1.9.2-p136 :023 > _.ord
 => 9731 

(If you're wondering, that underscore means "The result of the last command I 
entered into IRB." It's fantastically useful, though it gets annoying when you 
want to repeat commands using up arrow, etc.)

So, if you get something other than:

ruby-1.9.2-p136 :024 > ' '.ord
 => 32 

...then it's not a space. At that point, maybe report a bug, but maybe you'll 
also be able to work around it with a regex or something.