I don't really like the framing of the title for this project. Text is no longer treated as a dumb chain of bytes in 1.9, but that's not really what this project addresses. A good article with information about how strings have changed in 1.9 can be found here:
The problem is, when an outside service or file is provided to you, it doesn't always come with information about how the text is encoded. With Ruby 1.9, you have the option of specifying the character encoding for a given string, but if the string is from an outside source, it's often a guessing game.
http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string
The problem is, when an outside service or file is provided to you, it doesn't always come with information about how the text is encoded. With Ruby 1.9, you have the option of specifying the character encoding for a given string, but if the string is from an outside source, it's often a guessing game.