From: Emmanuel Touzery <emmanuel.touzery@...>
Date: 2003-09-25T19:41:57+09:00
Subject: repost: system encoding?

Hello,

    I'm reading data from different encodings (web pages), i first 
thought about converting all to unicode, but it's not handy right now in 
ruby. Then i thought i might as well convert it all to my local encoding 
for easy processing in ruby (uppercase, regexps etc) [1]. it's easy to 
hardcode my local encoding in the app, but i'd like to make it generic, 
to work at my work (windows, cp1250) and at home (linux, iso8859-2).
    Hence the question: how can i get a string of my local encoding, on 
linux or windows? or how do i tell iconv "convert to my local encoding"?

thank you,

emmanuel
[1] i thought about it late, because i didn't think latin2 has so many 
chars from latin1 as it does; many times the conversion would be successful.

Emmanuel Touzery wrote:

> a string is considered by ruby as encoded as <insert your locale 
> here>. If you want to treat strings from other encodings, you can 
> convert encoding using "iconv" (bundled with ruby 1.8); in your case, 
> you can use iconv to convert the string to your local encoding 
> (iso-8859-1) and then capitalize will work fine.
>  
>
which made me wonder: how do I find out what is the current local 
encoding for the computer in a portable (unix/windows) way?

emmanuel