Michael Selig wrote:
> My "ideal" would be that Ruby automatically converted to a common
> encoding rather than raising an Encoding Compatibility Error. And
> although Unicode apparently may not cope with every character on the
> planet at present, I guess it will one day, and it seems to me to be
> the sensible thing to use as the "common encoding" - or UTF-8 to be
> precise.
> It *does* mean that strings may "magically" be converted to UTF-8, but
> I don't see this as a big deal as long as when they are output they
> are converted back to the necessary encoding (which I think Ruby does
> with files now). If the "magic" conversion is a problem, maybe there
> should be a switch to turn it on & off. 

Have you read Matz's post abount yen sign problem?  Converter IS a
problem; you cannot make a converter over (Encoding A -> Unicode ->
Encoding A).  That must lose some input.  Data loss is the worst thing
to introduce, so ruby asks you to take the risk by explicitly calling a
conversion method.

Problems on character encodings are sourced from complexities of human
activities.  I can hardly believe there are any simple, perfect, and/or
"neat" solution.