Question on reading text files in Windows

[Jim Knowlton]

I am running Ruby 1.86 on Windows, and having trouble reading in some
text files. For some text files, if I do something simple like:

myfile = File.open("logfile.log")
contents = myfile.read()
puts contents

I get each character seperated by a space, such as:

”= = = V e r b o s e l o g g i n g s t a r t e d : 1 / 2 8 / 2
0 0 9
1 3 : 4 5 : 0 6 B u i l d t y p e : S H I P U N I C O D E

If I bring up the file in even a bare-bones editor (such as VIM), I
get the file as it normally is (without any extraneous spaces). Does
anyone know why this would be, or how I can work around it? It's
causing issues as I am trying to write a script to search for a
particular string of text, and obviously it isn't found, even though
it should be.

Thanks,

Jim

 

[Stefan Lang]

I am running Ruby 1.86 on Windows, and having trouble reading in some
text files. For some text files, if I do something simple like:

myfile =3D File.open("logfile.log")
contents =3D myfile.read()
puts contents

I get each character seperated by a space, such as:

=94=3D =3D =3D V e r b o s e l o g g i n g s t a r t e d : 1 / 2 = 8 / 2
0 0 9
1 3 : 4 5 : 0 6 B u i l d t y p e : S H I P U N I C O D E

If I bring up the file in even a bare-bones editor (such as VIM), I
get the file as it normally is (without any extraneous spaces). Does
anyone know why this would be, or how I can work around it? It's
causing issues as I am trying to write a script to search for a
particular string of text, and obviously it isn't found, even though
it should be.

The file is probably UTF-16 encoded and starts with a BOM.
Try to convert the string to UTF-8, or switch to Ruby 1.9.

Stefan

 

[Stefan Lang]

The file is probably UTF-16 encoded and starts with a BOM.
Try to convert the string to UTF-8, or switch to Ruby 1.9.

Sorry, I meant to say "Try to convert the string to UTF-8 WITH Iconv"

Stefan

 

[Jim Knowlton]

Thanks for the pointer! I actually ended up using the iconv module,
and it worked like a charm. Incidentally, in case anyone else is
curious about this, Windows .REG files get saved as UTF-16 by default.