I am just starting to learn Ruby (to eventually move to RoR), but I was just told that Ruby does not support unicode. Is it true? How do Ruby programmers go about supporting unicode?
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I am just starting to learn Ruby (to eventually move to RoR), but I was just told that Ruby does not support unicode. Is it true? How do Ruby programmers go about supporting unicode?
What you heard is outdated and applies (only partially) to Ruby 1.8 or before. The latest stable version of Ruby (1.9), supports no less than 95 different character encodings (counted on my system just now). This includes pretty much all known Unicode Transformation Formats, including UTF-8.
The previous stable version of Ruby (1.8) has partial support for UTF-8.
If you use Rails, it takes care of default UTF-8 encoding for you. If all you need is UTF-8 encoding awareness, Rails will work for you no matter if you run Ruby 1.9 or Ruby 1.8. If you have very specific character encoding requirements, you should aim for Ruby 1.9.
If you’re really interested, here is a series of articles describing the encoding issues in Ruby 1.8 and how they were worked around, and eventually solved in Ruby 1.9. Rails still includes workarounds for many common flaws in Ruby 1.8.