From: Brian Candler <lists@...>
Date: 2012-09-20T16:58:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Encoding question

Nathan Beyer wrote in post #1076380:
> Once you do know the encoding, the proper
> way to open up a file is to declare the external encoding of the file,
> like this -
>
> f = File.open('somefile.txt', 'r:iso-8859-1')

That is correct.

> Then when you read content from the file, the data in the file will be
> transcoded from 'iso-8859-1' to the default internal encoding of the
> Ruby interpreter instance (generally UTF-8).

That is incorrect. But encodings in ruby are such a damned mess that I'm 
not surprised that many people don't understand it.

*No* transcoding takes place in the above example, regardless of the 
where it runs; the data is read into the string as-is. However, every 
String which you read from the file using f.gets or f.getc is marked to 
say that it is encoded using UTF-8. (But not Strings which you read 
using f.read)

> You can define what
> internal encoding to use by further qualifying the open, like this -
>
> f = File.open('somefile.txt', 'r:iso-8859-1:utf-8')

Yes, in *that* case, ruby will transcode.

> Check out this article for some more information -
> http://nuclearsquid.com/writings/ruby-1-9-encodings/.

For as much of the gorey details as I managed to work out before giving 
up, you can also try
https://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/string19.rb

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