From: Mark Wilson <mwilson13@...>
Date: 2003-07-15T15:25:33+09:00
Subject: Ruby Character Encoding

I'm interested in any (i.e., arbitrary) extensions of Ruby's character 
encoding.

As far as I can tell, the String class stops at integer value 255. For 
example:

irb:> string << 256
TypeError: cannot convert Fixnum into String
         from (irb):18:in `<<'
         from (irb):18
         from :0

Is there any way to extend the character encoding within Ruby? Has 
anyone extended Ruby's character encoding using C or C++?

I would like to be able to do

string << 3004

and have a character appended to the string. I actually don't care what 
the character is, so long as it is unique.

FYI, my motivation for this question is because I want to map a large 
number of objects to characters. I want to do this mapping to 
characters rather than other objects because I want to use 
character-based tools to perform analysis (such as Levenstein distance).

Thank you in advance for any help.

Regards,

Mark