On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 01:45:57PM +0900, Dido Sevilla wrote:
> No. Before Unicode there were already several different ways of
> encoding Japanese text (just as we English speakers have had ASCII and
> EBCDIC in the past), and Unicode is only one of them. Apparently
> Unicode isn't even the dominant way of doing so just yet: the JIS
> encodings seem to be more popular at the moment, and there are even
> three variations of JIS (Shift-JIS is by far the most widely used for
> Japanese web pages and such, and ISO-2022-JP is most widely used for
> Japanese email, and Japanese locales on Unix/Linux use the JIS EUC
> encoding).
> 
> See this site for more information on this complicated topic:
> 
> http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~aelias4/encodings.html

This is interesting, thanks for the pointer! But then, how are these
popular schemes supported by ruby? Isn't it possible/desirable to use a
generic scheme which can be realized then either as unicode or as one of
the above encodings?

Csaba