ruby 1.9 hates you and me and the encodings we rode in on so just getused to it.

[DJ Jazzy Linefeed]

def prep_file(path)

ret = ''

x = File.open(path)

x.lines.each do |l|
l.gsub!('\n', ' ')
ret << l
end

puts ret

end
....
compare.rb:64:in `gsub': broken UTF-8 string (ArgumentError)
from compare.rb:64:in `block in prep_file'
from compare.rb:63:in `each_line'
from compare.rb:63:in `call'
from compare.rb:63:in `each'
from compare.rb:63:in `prep_file'
from compare.rb:144:in `<main>'

Hm. Okay, I love you ruby, we can just talk this thing out and I can
get back to...

x.lines.each do |l|
ret << l
end

# (I love you too)

Alright baby, Daddy gets confused and angry sometimes... do you wanna
make a little string love...?

ret = ''

x = File.open(path)

x.lines.each do |l|
ret << l
end

puts ret.class

# String

Mhm, it smells like you do. Why don't we take this off...

x.lines.each do |l|
ret << l
end

puts ret.gsub!('a', 'test')

end
....
compare.rb:69:in `gsub!': broken UTF-8 string (ArgumentError)
from compare.rb:69:in `prep_file'
from compare.rb:145:in `<main>'

Hey, Ruby, if it's that week of the month we can just cuddle. Here,
try this...


x.lines.each do |l|
ret << l
end

puts ret
....
# (big string)

See, thats good. Thats a string and that's something we have in
common, maybe we were just talking about different encodings. Let's
see what it's made of.

puts ret.encoding

# UTF-8

I'm gonna go get a gallon of milk and I'll be back soon. You wait
right there. (grumbles)

 

[7stud --]

I'm gonna go get a gallon of milk and I'll be back soon. You wait
right there. (grumbles)

Just shut your eyes and hum the mantra, "Ruby doesn't get in your way.
Ruby doesn't get in your way." You obviously need to get "cleared".
Please set up an appointment with your nearest Church of Scientology.

 

[Todd Benson]

def prep_file(path)

ret = ''

x = File.open(path)

x.lines.each do |l|
l.gsub!('\n', ' ')
ret << l
end

puts ret

end
...
compare.rb:64:in `gsub': broken UTF-8 string (ArgumentError)
from compare.rb:64:in `block in prep_file'
from compare.rb:63:in `each_line'
from compare.rb:63:in `call'
from compare.rb:63:in `each'
from compare.rb:63:in `prep_file'
from compare.rb:144:in `<main>'

Hm. Okay, I love you ruby, we can just talk this thing out and I can
get back to...

x.lines.each do |l|
ret << l
end

# (I love you too)

Alright baby, Daddy gets confused and angry sometimes... do you wanna
make a little string love...?

ret = ''

x = File.open(path)

x.lines.each do |l|
ret << l
end

puts ret.class

# String

Mhm, it smells like you do. Why don't we take this off...

x.lines.each do |l|
ret << l
end

puts ret.gsub!('a', 'test')

end
...
compare.rb:69:in `gsub!': broken UTF-8 string (ArgumentError)
from compare.rb:69:in `prep_file'
from compare.rb:145:in `<main>'

Hey, Ruby, if it's that week of the month we can just cuddle. Here,
try this...


x.lines.each do |l|
ret << l
end

puts ret
...
# (big string)

See, thats good. Thats a string and that's something we have in
common, maybe we were just talking about different encodings. Let's
see what it's made of.

puts ret.encoding

# UTF-8

I'm gonna go get a gallon of milk and I'll be back soon. You wait
right there. (grumbles)

I love it. Another person that wants a babel fish. The irony is in
the language demonstrating as much. In other words, I need Jazzy
Linefeed encoding (I left off the DJ because there might be other
types of linefeeds).

Todd

 

[Gary Watson]

Thanks for the suggestion of using ascii-8bit. This solved my problem.

The line of code that was giving me fits was the following line. Worked
in 1.8 but didn't work in 1.9.0

puts Dir["**/*"].select {|x| x.match(/(jpg)$/)}

when I changed it to this

puts Dir["**/*"].select {|x|
x.force_encoding("ascii-8bit").match(/(jpg)$/)}

all was well.

Regards,
Gary

 

[Albert Schlef]

l.gsub!('\n', ' ')

[snip]
Regular expression operation does not work fine on broken strings. It

An off-topic question:

So String#gsub always use the regexp engine (even if the pattern is a
plain string).

Now,

Is there a way, in Ruby, to do search/replace that don't involve the
regexp engine?

I'm asking this because I figure that not using the regexp engine would
be faster (but maybe it'll be only marginally faster, I don't know).

I know one can do...

s[ 'find' ] = 'replace'

...but it replaces only one occurance the the substring (and does it
skip the regexp engine?).

 

[Brian Candler]

compare.rb:64:in `gsub': broken UTF-8 string (ArgumentError)

Yep. Ruby 1.9 will raise exceptions in all sorts of odd places,
dependent on both the tagged encoding of the string *and* its content at
that point in time.

I got as far as recording 200 behaviours of String in ruby 1.9 before I
gave up:
http://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/string19.rb

The solution I use is simple: stick to ruby 1.8.x. When that branch
dies, perhaps reia will be ready. If not I'll move to something else.

IMO, both python 3 and erlang have got the right idea when it comes to
handling UTF8.

 

[Benoit Daloze]

Yep. Ruby 1.9 will raise exceptions in all sorts of odd places,
dependent on both the tagged encoding of the string *and* its content at
that point in time.

I got as far as recording 200 behaviours of String in ruby 1.9 before I
gave up:
http://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/string19.rb

The solution I use is simple: stick to ruby 1.8.x. When that branch
dies, perhaps reia will be ready. If not I'll move to something else.

IMO, both python 3 and erlang have got the right idea when it comes to
handling UTF8.

Hi,

I got this kind of problem yesterday too.

While taking some file names with Dir#[], I got some special results.

I was searching for "bad" file names, I mean file names with =C3=A9,=C3=AA =
or
whatever. When I print the String given in the block directly, no problem.

But then I come with things like:
/Users/benoitdaloze/Library/GlestGame/data/lang/espan>=CC=83<ol.lng

(The ~ is separated from the n and then is not =C3=B1). The Regexp is actin=
g like
it is 2 different characters. How to handle that easily? I tried to change
the script encoding in MacRoman, but it produced an error of bad encoding
not matching UTF-8.

as output of this script (which is then not able to rename any wrong file,
because tr! seem to not work either on name) :

path =3D ARGV[0] || "/"

ALLOWED_CHARS =3D "A-Za-z0-9 %#:$@?!=3D+~&|'()\\[\\]{}.,\r_-"

Dir["#{File.expand_path(path)}/**/*"].each { |f|
name =3D File.basename(f)
unless name =3D~ /^[#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+$/
puts File.dirname(f) + '/' + name.gsub(/([^#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+)/,
">\\1<")

if name.tr!('=C3=A9=C3=A8=C3=AA', 'e') =3D~ /^[#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+$/=
# Here it is not
complete, it is just a test, but it doesn't work even for 'fil=C3=A9name'
File.rename(f, File.dirname(f) + '/' + name)
puts "\trenamed in #{name}"
break
end
end
}

 

[Edward Middleton]

Yep. Ruby 1.9 will raise exceptions in all sorts of odd places,
dependent on both the tagged encoding of the string *and* its content at
that point in time.

If you don't arbitrarily set the encoding, when will this be a problem?

Edward

 

[Brian Candler]

But then I come with things like:
/Users/benoitdaloze/Library/GlestGame/data/lang/espan>̃<ol.lng

(The ~ is separated from the n and then is not ñ). The Regexp is acting
like
it is 2 different characters. How to handle that easily? I tried to
change
the script encoding in MacRoman, but it produced an error of bad
encoding
not matching UTF-8.

I don't know what you mean. If Dir.[] tells you that the file name is
<e> <s> <p> <a> <n> <~> <o> <l> <.> <l> <n> <g>, is that not the true
filename?

I suggest you try something like this:

puts "Source encoding: #{"".encoding}"
puts "External encoding: #{Encoding.default_external}"
Dir["*.lng"] do |fn|
puts "Name: #{fn.inspect}"
puts "Encoding: #{fn.encoding}"
puts "Chars: #{fn.chars.to_a.inspect}"
puts "Codepoints: #{fn.codepoints.to_a.inspect}"
puts "Bytes: #{fn.bytes.to_a.inspect}"
puts
end

then post the results for this file here. Then also post what you think
the true filename is.

Then you can see whether: (1) Dir.[] is returning the correct sequence
of bytes for the filename or not; and (2) Dir.[] is tagging the string
with the correct encoding or not.

(This is one of the thousands of cases I did *not* document in
string19.rb; I did some of the core methods on String, but of course
every method in every class which either returns a string or accepts a
string argument needs to document how it handles encodings)

as output of this script (which is then not able to rename any wrong
file,
because tr! seem to not work either on name) :

path = ARGV[0] || "/"

ALLOWED_CHARS = "A-Za-z0-9 %#:$@?!=+~&|'()\\[\\]{}.,\r_-"

Dir["#{File.expand_path(path)}/**/*"].each { |f|
name = File.basename(f)
unless name =~ /^[#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+$/
puts File.dirname(f) + '/' + name.gsub(/([^#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+)/,
">\\1<")

if name.tr!('éèê', 'e') =~ /^[#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+$/ # Here it is
not
complete, it is just a test, but it doesn't work even for 'filéname'
File.rename(f, File.dirname(f) + '/' + name)
puts "\trenamed in #{name}"
break
end
end
}

What error do you get? Is it failing to match the é at all (tr! returns
nil), or is an encoding error raised in tr!, or is an error raised by
File.rename ?

 

[Benoit Daloze]

But then I come with things like:
/Users/benoitdaloze/Library/GlestGame/data/lang/espan>=CC=83<ol.lng

(The ~ is separated from the n and then is not =C3=B1). The Regexp is a= cting
like
it is 2 different characters. How to handle that easily? I tried to
change
the script encoding in MacRoman, but it produced an error of bad
encoding
not matching UTF-8.

I don't know what you mean. If Dir.[] tells you that the file name is
<e> <s> <p> <a> <n> <~> <o> <l> <.> <l> <n> <g>, is that not the true
filename?

I suggest you try something like this:

puts "Source encoding: #{"".encoding}"
puts "External encoding: #{Encoding.default_external}"
Dir["*.lng"] do |fn|
puts "Name: #{fn.inspect}"
puts "Encoding: #{fn.encoding}"
puts "Chars: #{fn.chars.to_a.inspect}"
puts "Codepoints: #{fn.codepoints.to_a.inspect}"
puts "Bytes: #{fn.bytes.to_a.inspect}"
puts
end

then post the results for this file here. Then also post what you think
the true filename is.

The true filename is (from the Finder and Terminal):
-rw-r--r--@ 1 benoitdaloze staff 3758 Jul 17 2008 espa=C3=B1ol.lng
So, with the '=C3=B1'.

I don't know which is the encoding of the filename on HFS+, from Wikipedia
it s said as UTF-16, with Decomposition:
"names which are also character encoded in
UTF-16<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16>and normalized to a form
very nearly the same as Unicode
Normalization Form D (NFD)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_normalizati=
on>
[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#cite_note-3> (which means that
precomposed characters like =C3=A9 are decomposed in the HFS+ filename and
therefore count as two
characters[5]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#cite_note-4>"
So, that's probably a problem of encoding for Dir.[]

I changed a little the script, to compare with a String hard-coded inside
the script (rn =3D "espa=C3=B1ol.lng")

ruby 1.9.2dev (2009-12-11 trunk 26067) [x86_64-darwin10.2.0]

Source encoding: UTF-8
External encoding: UTF-8

Format:
String in the code
filename from Dir[]

String equality: false

Name:
"espa=C3=B1ol.lng"
"espan=CC=83ol.lng"
Encoding:
UTF-8
UTF-8
Chars:
["e", "s", "p", "a", "=C3=B1", "o", "l", ".", "l", "n", "g"]
["e", "s", "p", "a", "n", "=CC=83", "o", "l", ".", "l", "n", "g"]
Codepoints:
[101, 115, 112, 97, 241, 111, 108, 46, 108, 110, 103]
[101, 115, 112, 97, 110, 771, 111, 108, 46, 108, 110, 103]
Bytes:
[101, 115, 112, 97, 195, 177, 111, 108, 46, 108, 110, 103]
[101, 115, 112, 97, 110, 204, 131, 111, 108, 46, 108, 110, 103]

Then you can see whether: (1) Dir.[] is returning the correct sequence
of bytes for the filename or not; and (2) Dir.[] is tagging the string
with the correct encoding or not.

(1) Dir[] seems to return a correct String in UTF-8, while being different
(!!) from a String inside in UTF-8
But looking at the codepoints and bytes, it's very different ...

(2) That's probably the case, let's look by forcing the encoding to
MacRoman:
Or not ... making crazy results like: "espan\xCC\x83ol.lng" or
"espan\u0303ol.lng"

Well, this is out of my poor knowledge of encoding I'm afraid

The most frustrating is it's printing the same...

P.S.: Well I got also filenames with "\r", quite weared,no? ("Target
Application Alias\r", and it "\r" is shown as "?" in the Terminal)

(This is one of the thousands of cases I did *not* document in

string19.rb; I did some of the core methods on String, but of course
every method in every class which either returns a string or accepts a
string argument needs to document how it handles encodings)

as output of this script (which is then not able to rename any wrong
file,
because tr! seem to not work either on name) :

path =3D ARGV[0] || "/"

ALLOWED_CHARS =3D "A-Za-z0-9 %#:$@?!=3D+~&|'()\\[\\]{}.,\r_-"

Dir["#{File.expand_path(path)}/**/*"].each { |f|
name =3D File.basename(f)
unless name =3D~ /^[#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+$/
puts File.dirname(f) + '/' + name.gsub(/([^#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+)/= ,
">\\1<")

if name.tr!('=C3=A9=C3=A8=C3=AA', 'e') =3D~ /^[#{ALLOWED_CHARS}= ]+$/ # Here it is
not
complete, it is just a test, but it doesn't work even for 'fil=C3=A9nam= e'
File.rename(f, File.dirname(f) + '/' + name)
puts "\trenamed in #{name}"
break
end
end
}

What error do you get? Is it failing to match the =C3=A9 at all (tr! retu= rns
nil), or is an encoding error raised in tr!, or is an error raised by
File.rename ?

tring
inside the script (eg: "e=C3=B1o".tr!('=C3=B1', 'n'))

 

[Marnen Laibow-Koser]

The solution I use is simple: stick to ruby 1.8.x. When that branch
dies, perhaps reia will be ready. If not I'll move to something else.

IMO, both python 3 and erlang have got the right idea when it comes to
handling UTF8.

Hi,

I got this kind of problem yesterday too.

While taking some file names with Dir#[], I got some special results.

I was searching for "bad" file names, I mean file names with é,ê or
whatever. When I print the String given in the block directly, no
problem.

But then I come with things like:
/Users/benoitdaloze/Library/GlestGame/data/lang/espan>̃<ol.lng

(The ~ is separated from the n and then is not ñ). The Regexp is acting
like
it is 2 different characters.

And so it is. If memory serves, Mac OS X stores filenames in normal
form D.

How to handle that easily?

Normalize to normal form C instead.

Best,

 

[Bill Kelly]

I got as far as recording 200 behaviours of String in ruby 1.9 before I
gave up:
http://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/string19.rb

The solution I use is simple: stick to ruby 1.8.x. When that branch
dies, perhaps reia will be ready. If not I'll move to something else.

IMO, both python 3 and erlang have got the right idea when it comes to
handling UTF8.

Could you summarize what you feel the key difference of
the python 3 / erlang approach is, compared to ruby19 ?

I'm a relative newbie in dealing with character encodings,
but I do recall a few lengthy discussions on this list when
ruby19's M17N was being developed, where the "UTF-8 only"
approaches of some other languages were deemed insufficient
for various reasons.

However, my understanding is that one is supposed to be
able to effectively make ruby behave as a "UTF-8 only"
language if one makes sure external data is transcoded to
UTF-8 at I/O boundaries.

I realize there may be some caveats with regard to locale,
although I invoke my ruby19 scripts with -EUTF-8:UTF-8.

So far, my experience with ruby19 M17N has _not_ been
problematic. The only difficulties I've encountered have
been when dealing with external data in some unknown
encoding, where I've had to do some programmatic guesswork
and finagling to make sort of a best-effort conversion of
the external data to UTF-8 at the I/O boundary.

But that is something I can't imagine python or erlang
helping me much with either.

* * *

Reflecting some more, I do recall that James Gray had
remarked on the difficulty of modifying one of his libraries
so that it would be effectively encoding agnostic, and be
able to handle data in whatever encoding was thrown at it.

So from that perspective I can see how a "UTF-8 only"
approach at the language level should simplify things.

But from my current perspective as an application developer
who is taking the approach of ensuring all data read into
my program is converted to UTF-8, I'm wondering if my
experience is essentially similar to what it would be in
a "UTF-8 only" language.


Regards,

Bill

 

[Edward Middleton]

Could you summarize what you feel the key difference of
the python 3 / erlang approach is, compared to ruby19 ?

Taking a UTF-8 approach is easier to implement because you enforce all
strings to be UTF-8 and ignore when this doesn't work. Kind of like
saying everything will be ASCII or converted to it

I'm a relative newbie in dealing with character encodings,
but I do recall a few lengthy discussions on this list when
ruby19's M17N was being developed, where the "UTF-8 only"
approaches of some other languages were deemed insufficient
for various reasons.

Not everything maps one-to-one to UTF-8.

However, my understanding is that one is supposed to be
able to effectively make ruby behave as a "UTF-8 only"
language if one makes sure external data is transcoded to
UTF-8 at I/O boundaries.

That is pretty much it. The problem is that a lot of libraries still
don't handle encodings. This results in some spurious errors when a
function requiring compatible encoding operates on them[1]. The
solution is to add support for handling encodings.

Edward

1. As appose to ruby 1.8 which would silently ignore actual errors
caused by the use of incompatible encodings.

 

[Benoit Daloze]

But then I come with things like:
/Users/benoitdaloze/Library/GlestGame/data/lang/espan>=CC=83<ol.lng

(The ~ is separated from the n and then is not =C3=B1). The Regexp is a= cting
like
it is 2 different characters. How to handle that easily? I tried to
change
the script encoding in MacRoman, but it produced an error of bad
encoding
not matching UTF-8.

I don't know what you mean. If Dir.[] tells you that the file name is
<e> <s> <p> <a> <n> <~> <o> <l> <.> <l> <n> <g>, is that not the true
filename?

I suggest you try something like this:

puts "Source encoding: #{"".encoding}"
puts "External encoding: #{Encoding.default_external}"
Dir["*.lng"] do |fn|
puts "Name: #{fn.inspect}"
puts "Encoding: #{fn.encoding}"
puts "Chars: #{fn.chars.to_a.inspect}"
puts "Codepoints: #{fn.codepoints.to_a.inspect}"
puts "Bytes: #{fn.bytes.to_a.inspect}"
puts
end

then post the results for this file here. Then also post what you think
the true filename is.

Then you can see whether: (1) Dir.[] is returning the correct sequence
of bytes for the filename or not; and (2) Dir.[] is tagging the string
with the correct encoding or not.

(This is one of the thousands of cases I did *not* document in
string19.rb; I did some of the core methods on String, but of course
every method in every class which either returns a string or accepts a
string argument needs to document how it handles encodings)

as output of this script (which is then not able to rename any wrong
file,
because tr! seem to not work either on name) :

path =3D ARGV[0] || "/"

ALLOWED_CHARS =3D "A-Za-z0-9 %#:$@?!=3D+~&|'()\\[\\]{}.,\r_-"

Dir["#{File.expand_path(path)}/**/*"].each { |f|
name =3D File.basename(f)
unless name =3D~ /^[#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+$/
puts File.dirname(f) + '/' + name.gsub(/([^#{ALLOWED_CHARS}]+)/= ,
">\\1<")

if name.tr!('=C3=A9=C3=A8=C3=AA', 'e') =3D~ /^[#{ALLOWED_CHARS}= ]+$/ # Here it is
not
complete, it is just a test, but it doesn't work even for 'fil=C3=A9nam= e'
File.rename(f, File.dirname(f) + '/' + name)
puts "\trenamed in #{name}"
break
end
end
}

What error do you get? Is it failing to match the =C3=A9 at all (tr! retu= rns
nil), or is an encoding error raised in tr!, or is an error raised by
File.rename ?

" And so it is. If memory serves, Mac OS X stores filenames in normal
form D.

How to handle that easily?

Normalize to normal form C instead.

Best,
--
Marnen Laibow-Koser "

So that solved it, converting with Iconv.
It would probably only works on Mac the encoding "UTF-8-MAC", but that for
working on HFS+, so that's not really a problem.

I found the documentation(in 1.9.2) of Iconv a little messy ...
For exemple, typing 'ri Iconv#iconv'
------------------------------------------------------------ Iconv#iconv
Iconv.iconv(to, from, *strs)

and in 1.8.7
------------------------------------------------------------ Iconv#iconv
iconv(str, start=3D0, length=3D-1)

The result of ri(1.9.2) is the same of 'ri Iconv::iconv', what is kind of
very different.

Anyway, converting every filename using this works

fn =3D Iconv.open("UTF-8", "UTF-8-MAC") { |iconv|
iconv.iconv(fn)
}
or
fn =3D Iconv.iconv("UTF-8", "UTF-8-MAC", fn).shift

 

[Gary Watson]

I would like to chime in here and point out that sometimes you really
want to ignore the errors caused by mis-matched encodings, (as was the
case in my script where I just wanted to match filenames ending in *.mpg
and really didn't care if the characters occurring before had funkiness
going on with them.)

1.8 had this kind of behavior by default, and I'm assuming python3 and
erlang do too based on the descriptions given in this thread.

As Matz pointed out, you can force ruby1.9 to have this behavior simply
by using the ASCII-8 encoding rather than the default ASCII-7 encoding.
Basically causes the regular expression engine to look at the string as
a series of bytes again like it used to rather than freaking out when it
see's something it doesn't expect in that last byte.

I'm by no means knowledgeable about encodings, so take what I'm about to
say with a grain of salt. It seems like the old way of handling
encodings was permissive but imprecise, and the new way is precise but
not always permissive. I like the ability to be precise because before
that ability simply wasn't an option, however, since allot of people
seem to be confused by the default behavior why not make the default
behavior permissive and set it up so that IF YOU WANT to be precise you
can enable the proper encodings that ensure that behavior? To me this
seems to fall in with the principal of least surprise. (Sorry for
quoting it, I know it's over-quoted).

What do people think?

Regards
Gary

Could you summarize what you feel the key difference of
the python 3 / erlang approach is, compared to ruby19 ?

Taking a UTF-8 approach is easier to implement because you enforce all
strings to be UTF-8 and ignore when this doesn't work. Kind of like
saying everything will be ASCII or converted to it

I'm a relative newbie in dealing with character encodings,
but I do recall a few lengthy discussions on this list when
ruby19's M17N was being developed, where the "UTF-8 only"
approaches of some other languages were deemed insufficient
for various reasons.

Not everything maps one-to-one to UTF-8.

However, my understanding is that one is supposed to be
able to effectively make ruby behave as a "UTF-8 only"
language if one makes sure external data is transcoded to
UTF-8 at I/O boundaries.

That is pretty much it. The problem is that a lot of libraries still
don't handle encodings. This results in some spurious errors when a
function requiring compatible encoding operates on them[1]. The
solution is to add support for handling encodings.

Edward

1. As appose to ruby 1.8 which would silently ignore actual errors
caused by the use of incompatible encodings.

 

[Edward Middleton]

I'm by no means knowledgeable about encodings, so take what I'm about to
say with a grain of salt. It seems like the old way of handling
encodings was permissive but imprecise, and the new way is precise but
not always permissive. I like the ability to be precise because before
that ability simply wasn't an option, however, since allot of people
seem to be confused by the default behavior why not make the default
behavior permissive and set it up so that IF YOU WANT to be precise you
can enable the proper encodings that ensure that behavior? To me this
seems to fall in with the principal of least surprise. (Sorry for
quoting it, I know it's over-quoted).

I guess the problem is that if you do this no libraries will make an
effort to support encodings and you will lose all the advantages of
proper encoding handling. I have to say, I cringed when the idea of
handling encodings properly came up, because it is different from ruby
1.8 and the transition was going to be difficult. Having said that, if
you are going to support encodings this is probably the best way to do
it, and in reality it is not that hard to get it right.

Edward

 

[Brian Candler]

Could you summarize what you feel the key difference of
the python 3 / erlang approach is, compared to ruby19 ?

As far as I can tell, both have two distinct data structures. One
represents a binary object: a string of bytes. The other represents a
textual string, a string of UTF-8 codepoints. (In the case of erlang,
these are "binaries" and "lists" respectively).

ruby 1.9 has one String which tries to do both jobs. I commonly deal
with binary data: ASN1 encodings, PDFs, JPGs, firmware images, ZIP
files, and so on. And yet ruby 1.9 has it now deeply embedded that all
data is text (which is not clearly true: rather the converse, all text
is data). At best you can get ruby 1.9 to tell you that your data is
"ASCII-8BIT", even when it has nothing to do with ASCII whatsoever.

I really miss having an object which simply represents a "sequence of
bytes". Of course ruby 1.9 can do it, if you jump through the right
hoops.

I really miss being able to look at a simple expression such as
a = b + c
when I know that both b and c are String objects, and being able to say
for definite whether or not it will raise an exception.

However, my understanding is that one is supposed to be
able to effectively make ruby behave as a "UTF-8 only"
language if one makes sure external data is transcoded to
UTF-8 at I/O boundaries.

If you jump through the right hoops, you can do this. If you omit any of
the hoops, your program may work on some systems but not on others. ruby
1.9's behaviour is environment-sensitive.

But the worst part of all this is that it's totally undocumented. Look
into the 'ri' pages for most of ruby core, for any method which either
takes a string, returns a string, or acts on a string, and you are
unlikely to find any definition of its encoding-related behaviour,
including under what circumstances it may raise an exception.

By tagging every string with its own encoding, ruby 1.9 is solving a
problem that does not exist: that is, how do you write a program which
juggles multiple strings in different encodings all at the same time?

And as the OP has discovered, the built-in support is often incomplete
so that you have to use libraries like Iconv anyway.

 

[Tony Arcieri]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

By tagging every string with its own encoding, ruby 1.9 is solving a
problem that does not exist: that is, how do you write a program which
juggles multiple strings in different encodings all at the same time?

To play devil's advocate here, Japanese users do routinely have to deal with
multiple different encodings... Shift JIS on Windows/Mac, EUC-JP on *IX, and
ISO-2022-JP for email (if I even got that correct, it's somewhat hard to
keep track). And then on top of all of that there's Unicode in all its
various forms...

While I would personally never choose M17n as the solution for my own
language I can see why it makes sense for a language which originated in and
is popular in Japan. The encoding situation over there is something of a
mess.

 

[Brian Candler]

To play devil's advocate here, Japanese users do routinely have to deal
with
multiple different encodings... Shift JIS on Windows/Mac, EUC-JP on *IX,
and
ISO-2022-JP for email

Sure; and maybe they even want to process these formats without a
round-trip to UTF8. (By the way, ruby 1.9 *can't* handle Shift JIS
natively)

I want a programming language which (a) handles strings of bytes, and
(b) does so with simple, understandable, and predictable semantics: for
example, concat string 1 with string 2 to make string 3. Is that too
much to ask?

Anyway, I'll shut up now.

 

[Benoit Daloze]

Hi,

I think you're quite a little pessimist here

Until my post on this subject, I have never been complaining far from that,
and enjoyed to play with =E2=88=91, =E2=88=86 and so on.

And I was not complaining, jsut asking how to solve that (The fact it didn'=
t
handle the normalization form C is quite logical I think, no language would
do that easily).

I think having Unicode support is something very useful. Look for
example(even if it is a bad one) PHP and mb_* functions and all encoding
functions, scary, no? Well, I think it's quite intuitive how it is for the
moment, and most of the time doing concatenation is not a problem at all.

So, globally I think a good encoding support is really important, while
being not useful everyday.

Regards,

B.D.