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.=