From: ahoward <ahoward@...>
Date: 2003-02-19T03:08:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Reading Text files with extended ASCII characters

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, William Tihen wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have reviewed the mailing list ruby-talk and I found some interesting
> stuff, but I haven't seen the answer to reading (and creating) text
> files with extended ASCII characters.
>
> For example when I try to read a text file with the word:
> D�n
>
<snip>

seems to work :

/tmp > ruby -e "f = File.open 'foo', 'w'; f.puts 'D�n'"

/tmp > cat foo
D�n

/tmp > ruby -e "puts (IO.readlines 'foo')"
D�n

/tmp > ruby -e "lines = IO.readlines 'foo'; f = File.open 'foo', 'w'; f.puts lines"

/tmp > cat foo
D�n

are you in dos?  perhaps trying IO.binmode will help then...

when you say

> I get:
> D\366n
>
> If I save this and read it in again I get:
> D\\366n

i assume you mean in irb?  if so, this is simply because the display method of
strings displays � (and other extended chars) as their octal escaped equivs -
the byte value in the file is still the same, which you can see using cat or
opening the file from a test editor.

-a

-- 

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 | Ara Howard
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