Does Ruby share PHP's multibyte string problem?

Question

PHP has a lot of trouble with multibyte strings (non-ASCII characters). The entire language was built assuming that each character is a byte. To solve this they invented the mb_strings functions which you can use instead of the standard functions (which work fine).

strlen($str);
mb_strlen($str); // correct

However, this is really a pain since you have to verify that the code you download/find online uses these functions or enable the mb_string_overload which then might break some code that actually needs char = byte calculations.

Does Ruby share this problem?

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

5

It shares the problem. It's covered here at SO. You can use ActiveSupport::Multibyte for mb_chars support.

>> s =  "Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn"
=> "Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn"
>> puts s[0..3]
Iñt
=> nil
>> puts s.mb_chars[0..3]
Iñtë
=> nil
>> puts s.mb_chars.size
20
=> nil
>> puts s.size
27
=> nil

edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

Community

1
1

answered Jan 01 '10 at 18:21

Chandra Patni

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 01 '10 at 18:01

1

irb(main):002:0> 'ÿ'.length
=> 2

answered Jan 01 '10 at 18:01

TML

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 01 '10 at 19:08

1

I think Ruby 1.9 clears up this underlaying assumption

answered Jan 01 '10 at 19:08

RyanWilcox

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How so? Can you expand on that thought? – Xeoncross Jan 01 '10 at 20:17
http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string documents how strings are different in Ruby 1.9 – RyanWilcox Jan 02 '10 at 15:05

Does Ruby share PHP's multibyte string problem?

3 Answers3