>> Perhaps, but I was talking about an identical platform, O/S, and 
>> installation of ruby - but different configured locale (such as LANG, 
>> LC_CTYPE or LC_ALL environment variables)
> 
> So your main complaint is that Ruby honors the settings of your 
> environment?

My complaints are listed at 
http://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/soapbox.rb - but I guess 
the main one is what the OP saw. Same program, same data, same ruby, 
different behaviour.

Normally when analysing a program you only need to look at the program 
and its input, but ruby 1.9 has extra "hidden" input data in the form of 
environment variables which can alter your program's behaviour, or not, 
depending on the content of the input data as well.

I wonder how many Ruby users are fully aware of which environment 
variables influence POSIX locales, and which ones take precendence over 
the others?

I also note that there is an effort underway to standardise the Ruby 
language definition, and this has chosen 1.8.7 as its baseline.
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