From: Nathan Beyer <nbeyer@...>
Date: 2012-09-21T08:43:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Encoding question

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 2:58 AM, Brian Candler <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
> 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.

Indeed ...

1.9.3-p194 :015 > f = File.open('hello.txt', 'r:windows-1252')
 => #<File:hello.txt>
1.9.3-p194 :016 > c = f.read
 => "hello world!"
1.9.3-p194 :017 > c.encoding
 => #<Encoding:Windows-1252>

Looking at the documentation, I see what I missed
(http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/IO.html#method-c-new). I suppose that
makes.

>
> *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)

I'm not seeing this behavior.

1.9.3-p194 :001 > f = File.open('hello.txt', 'r:windows-1252')
 => #<File:hello.txt>
1.9.3-p194 :002 > c = f.getc
 => "h"
1.9.3-p194 :003 > c.encoding
 => #<Encoding:Windows-1252>