On Sep 17, 2008, at 9:32 PM, Michael Selig wrote: > I was only suggesting conversion to Unicode as a way of preventing > an error being raised. Hey, I know character encodings are hard. I'm still trying to get CSV completely converted. I'm getting closer all the time, but it's been tricky for sure. I'm sure it's a bit of Ruby's fault. The m17n code is still a little raw and I ran into several issues just exploring it. All of our efforts here are making things better though. Look at how many bugs were fixed in the last week just do to emails from you and me. The other thing that's very important to remember is that character encodings are just plain hard to get right. I think it's a pretty big testament that Ruby makes it possible for us to support all these encodings now. I'm definitely in the self-centered-universe camp that thought Unicode was best for most things. I know I would still recommend it in many cases, because it's pretty easy to implement and it does work in many cases. However, our Japanese friends are trying to tell us it's not a universal solution. It doesn't always work well for them in particular, so they would prefer we make something better. I for one am grateful for them teaching me this new lesson, hard or not. And if you prefer to do the UTF-8 everywhere strategy, you can, right? Transcode everything to UTF-8 when it comes in and then you can pretend it's all UTF-8 (because it is!), right? Don't we have the best of both worlds now? James Edward Gray II