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Asked: 2026-05-28T04:55:21+00:00

How does the magic comment in ruby​​ works? I am talking about: # Encoding:

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How does the magic comment in ruby​​ works? I am talking about:

# Encoding: utf-8

Is this a preprocessing directive? Are there other uses of this type of construction?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Ruby interpreter instructions at the top of the source file – this is called magic comment. Before processing your source code interpreter reads this line and sets proper encoding. It’s quite common for interpreted languages I believe. At least Python uses the same approach.

    You can specify encoding in a number of different ways (some of them are recognized by editors):

    # encoding: UTF-8
# coding: UTF-8
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-

    You can read some interesting stuff about source encoding in this article.

    The only thing I’m aware of that has similar construction is shebang, but it is related to Unix shells in general and is not Ruby-specific.

    magic_comments defined in ruby/ruby

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