John <jhs408 / gmail.com> wrote:

> I recently updated my gem library, now a simple program outputs \000
> chars.
> What has changed and is causing the \000 after each char output ?

As others have said, it looks like your input is UTF-16. Either *treat*
it as UTF-16 or convert it to something else... You *think* you know
what the input file looks like when you view it in some other program,
but that other program is hiding the null bytes from you. They are
really there. m.