From: peterjohannsen@... (pj)
Date: 2003-03-09T08:39:36+09:00
Subject: What character sets are available in Ruby ?

There is a Ruby FAQ which I read that said that Ruby only supports
ASCII. That is, AFAIK, a 7 bit character encoding scheme for a very
old character set (one with less than 128 characters).

I am hoping that that is out of date ?

I found one long thread, but it appeared to be speculative, about what
to do about Unicode, and I think it may have mixed up character sets
and character encoding schemes. (I often see Microsoft documentation
and Microsoft-trained or influenced programmers expounding on how
Unicode is 16 bits; this is the type of misunderstanding of which I'm
quite tired now).

What character set(s) are supported under Ruby, using (of course) what
character encoding schemes ?

I'm frankly hoping that UTF-8 is available, because I would happily
stick to UTF-8 -- well, assuming there is something like iconv
available to project down to CP-1252 for example when going to US
English MS-Windows (or down to UCS-2 when going to MS-Windows NT,
because, I don't think I'd risk believing scattered claims that (some
of) NT handles UTF-16).