Brief demonstration of using character encodings in Ruby 1.9

example.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# encoding: UTF-8

# Notice I set UTF-8 as the default above. As far as I'm concerned there
# are two choices of encoding: UTF-8, and legacy crap. If I need to deal
# with anything else I'll handle it explicitly, as in this example.

# Open an ISO-8859-1 file.
infile = File.open("iso88591.txt", "r:iso-8859-1")

# Read a line from the file. Even though we've specified a default encoding
# in this script, the line we read in stays in the encoding specified when 
# the file was opened.
line = infile.gets
puts "Line of text in original encoding:"
puts line
# Line shows up as garbage in my Linux terminal, which is UTF-8.

# Now convert it to UTF-8 and redisplay it
uline = line.encode("UTF-8")
puts "Line of text in UTF-8:"
puts uline
# This time it shows up correctly.

# Now we'll write out to a new file.
outfile = File.open("utf8.txt", "w:UTF-8")
outfile.puts line
# Ruby automatically converts the ISO-8859-1 string 
# to UTF-8 before writing to the file.

outfile.close
infile.close

iso88591.txt

Mini-esta��o de demonstra��o