fr Paul:
# A variation on "binary?" might read a file to see if it 
# deviates from 7-bit
# ASCII, but this will fail for perfectly valid Unicode text 
# files. So IMHO it's a bad idea.

ah, maybe i should state my problem better, how about "i'd like to know if a file is a pure text file". how should i do that in ruby?

thanks and kind regards -botp