From: "Thomas Kellerer" <YQDHXVLMUBXG / spammotel.com>
>
> That's precisely the ignorant attitude that caused the issues we currently have with
> differen character sets.

"Let me tell you something about You that YOU don't know. . . ." <grin>

> I'm a newbie with Ruby and until I read this discussion I simply assumed it would fully
> support Unicode "out of the box" especially given the fact that is originates from Japan.
> I'm actually very confused (not to say shocked) that there *is* a discussion if Ruby
> needs (or supports?) Unicode.

My understanding was that in Japan, character encodings such as EUC-JP or Shift_JIS
were widely preferred over Unicode.

> Unicode (and a relevant encoding such as UTF8) should be the *standard* for all (new)
> programming languages and not an exception.

Apparently not, as One Character Encoding to Rule Them All is not considered
satisfactory to many people.

Here's a long thread on the subject from the archives: http://tinyurl.com/ge2kp

Anyway, ruby 1.8 *does* have usable UTF-8 support "out of the box."  (See also
post #9 in that thread by Matz talking about 1.8.)

Ruby 1.9 has much broader support for handling multiple character encodings.


Regards,

Bill