That's good enough. But I'm afraid this could ( not would ) cause string
operations to slow down. I'm not an expirienced Linux etc programer...
Is it a problem to use Unicode?

My yesterday effort was in adding three pairs of instance methods to
String: dos2koi8!, win2koi8!, win2dos! ( with their "non_bangs" ). Those
methods simply convert their recievers. Those were written in Intel's
Pentium Assembler (because of my preferences :)))

Aleksei Guzev

# -----Original Message-----
# From: Yukihiro Matsumoto [mailto:matz / zetabits.com] 
# Sent: 25 ???? 2001 ?. 12:10
# To: ruby-talk ML
# Subject: [ruby-talk:16842] Re: national characters is strings
# 
# I'm a Japanese-speaker and having similar experience.  I'm 
# currently woking on multilingualized Ruby (Ruby M17N).  Would 
# the API like the following help you?
# 
#   String.default_encoding = "koi8"
#   IO.default_encoding = "koi8"
# 
#   pat = /RE in native Russian string/
# 
#   for line in open("file-in-koi8")
#     print if pat =~ line
#   end
# 
# If it would, stay tuned.  It would be merged in Ruby 1.8.  
# And your help about koi8 and such will be welcomed to support 
# new encodings. Prototype for Ruby M17N can be fetched from 
# CVS in ruby_m17n branch.
# 
# 							matz.
#