On Sep 18, 2005, at 5:05 PM, Joe Van Dyk wrote:
> On 9/17/05, Jon A. Lambert <jlsysinc / alltel.net> wrote:
>> Jon A. Lambert wrote:
>> Dear Jon,
>>
>> If you had bothered to read the source code you would have found a
>> bunch of slick character encoding tables in regex.c and know that
>> the lengths of characters in strings are dependent on the encoding
>> options you be running on.   As long as you be using usacii then
>> you'll be alright, but if you start messing with kanji you'll be  
>> bitten on
>> the ass as StringScanner will suddenly be popping and hopping
>> through 1,2, or n bytes at a time with getch.  So I'd recommend
>> using getbyte.
>>
>> There are enough hints about such things dropped in the very first
>> chapters of the "Coding Ruby: The Canonical Coder's Guide".
>> Pay attention and do some research before wasting our time.
>>
>
> It's necessary now to read C source code to figure out the API for
> StringScanner?

To be clear, I believe Jon's harsh response was written in response  
to himself. He was saying "Oops, I figured it out myself."