From: Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...>
Date: 2011-09-13T03:54:13+09:00
Subject: Re: how to write data in binary to a file?


On Sep 12, 2011, at 7:20 AM, Robert Klemme wrote:
> 
>> Now, if you open a file for write and set an external encoding (the
>> default is nil) it means "transcode to this encoding". But for some
>> reason, setting external encoding to ASCII-8BIT bypasses this rule.
> 
> See above.  The name ASCII-8BIT is probably not the best one to choose
> for this but if you think about it as BINARY then everything fits
> nicely together.

I think the anomaly that Brian pointed out was that the transcoding during IO behaved differently than explicit transcoding:

> Normally, transcoding a UTF-8 string (which contains non-ASCII 
> characters) to ASCII-8BIT would raise an exception:
> 
> irb(main):006:0> "groß".encode("ASCII-8BIT")
> Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: U+00DF from UTF-8 to ASCII-8BIT
> 
> But now we have a special case where it *doesn't* raise an exception :-(



It makes sense to me that transcoding to 'binary' (or 'ASCII-8BIT') would just copy bytes but it doesn't make sense that implicit transcoding via IO and explicit transcoding via #encode behave differently.

Gary Wright