On Oct 23, 2011, at 4:05 PM, Perry Smith wrote:
> On Oct 23, 2011, at 12:56 PM, Steve Klabnik wrote:
>> Also, I don't know the specifics of 8859-1, but there are some
>> encodings that are just simply not compatible with each other. Try
>> adding a UTF-8 string to an ASCII string, for example...
>=20
> I believe your example is not right but the general case is true.  If =
string A is
> encoded in EnA and string B is encoded in EnB, then it can happen that
> A can not be re-encoded in EnB nor B re-encoded in EnA.
>=20
> But as far as I know, Unicode claims to be able to encode everything =
and
> UTF-8 is just a more compact version of Unicode.  I believe (perhaps =
mistakenly)
> that everything can be re-encoded to Unicode (and thus encoded to =
UTF-8).  Coding
> everything in Unicode is how a lot of other languages deal with this =
problem.

This is the issue.  For certain encodings you can't round-trip through =
Unicode and get back your input document, so ruby does not automatically =
perform such conversions on your behalf.  You can look back through the =
archives to find threads on the specifics.=