Hello,

	I searched internet and the ml and realised this question was asked many 
times, but i never found a satisfying answer for me.

	I have an application that will read data (web pages) in different encodings 
(at least latin1, latin2, possibly cp1250, potentially i would like to 
support all possible encodings letting the user give me a string.. maybe i'm 
dreaming).
	For now I only support latin2. but when i'll add utf-8 and other encodings, 
i'll then mix all those encodings in a file...
	i would like to convert these strings to unicode and from then on only to 
deal with unicode.

	From what I understand:
a/ the character set conversion is not supported from ruby proper. there are 
libraries (where???). i found uconv, but it seems more utf8-japanese 
encodings than latin1/2. i didn't find anything else in 
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/cat.rhtml?category_major=Library;category_minor=I18N
and
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/cat.rhtml?category_major=Library;category_minor=Text

maybe http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=codeconv but i see only binary, 
euc (what's that?), sjis, utf8 support.
i don't think EUC is latin1/2, but I may be wrong.

for this conversion I could use "recode" in command-line although it's not 
very elegant :O(

b/ anyway it's a moot point, because ruby doesn't handle unicode strings.. at 
least it's what I understood. am I wrong? Well, i read it should work, but 
then from what I understood capitalize, size etc don't work. once more, if I 
understood correctly, there are libaries for this (one is 0.1, one is 0.2 
"may work").

I'm also worried after seeing on a xterm -u8:
[emmanuel@emmanuels output]$ irb
irb(main):001:0> "a".size
=> 1
irb(main):002:0> "".size
=> 2
irb(main):003:0> 

maybe you don't see the second character, it's latin2, and it's just one 
character...

so, is it so bad as i seems, doctor?

emmanuel

PS: thank you for reading this long mail, and as I said, I'm aware this was 
asked many times, only I didn't find anything clear yet...
-- 
"If there is any kind of God, it's not in you or in me,
but in the space between us"
	-- Celine, "Before Sunrise"
(It's not about what you do, it's about what you give.)