From: "Stephan Kämper" <Stephan.Kaemper@...>
Date: 2004-04-01T23:19:25+09:00
Subject: Re: how to match acented letters on windows

Hi Gabriele,

gabriele renzi wrote:
> Hi gurus and nubys,
> 
> I just noticed that accented letters like ������ (actually, if someone
> can see them correctly in this message, either)
>  are not matched by /[a-z]/ or \w on windows.
> 

 >irb
irb(main):001:0> a = "Wrongly �cc�nt�d"
=> "Wrongly \240cc\212nt\210d"
irb(main):002:0> a =~ /�/
=> nil
irb(main):003:0> a =~ /�/
=> 11
irb(main):004:0> a =~ /�/
=> 14
irb(main):005:0>

They are matched, but they're not part of [a-z] apparently.
What I think is, [a-z] is somehow mapped to the ASCII (or whatever) code.
Anyway

irb(main):002:0> a =~ /[�-�]/
=> 14
irb(main):003:0>

(Running a 1.8.0 on WinXP)

BTW, you could as well write "y��r str�ng g��s h�r�" =~ /[\224-\239]/
Using that you'll get at least the vocals (I know of).
Note that there are a whole lot of accented letters: Check your 
character table, somewhere in Start|Programs|Utilities|System...
I translated from my German menu entries, so YMMV a bit.

> I've not tryed on *nix with proper locale set, but I wonder if,
> anyway, there is something special I should do to allow this kind of
> special letters to be matched as letters.
> 
> (running pragprog ruby 1.8.1 on win xp)

Now, that leads me to a question: _Should_ accented letters be matched 
by [a-z]? I personally am not sure whether it does...

Happy rubying

Stephan