Mastering Ruby: Strings and Encodings

Why Strings?

They're everywhere!

As devs, you and I create tons of strings. Probably more than any other object on a day to day basis. How much do you really know about strings? How about encodings? How familiar are you with Unicode and UTF-8?

Do you know why this would happen?

'é' == 'é' # => false

Or why this length might be wrong?

'à'.length # => 2

Do you know what dummy encodings are?

Encoding::UTF_16.dummy? # => true

How about what this does?

[128077, 32, 128078].pack('U*')

Do you know how to use an encoding converter?

Encoding::Converter.new('UTF-8', 'US-ASCII')

About the Author

Hi, I'm Aaron Lasseigne. I've been using Ruby for more than a decade. During that time, I've presented and written about Ruby including 13 articles in Ruby Weekly. I organize the Dallas Ruby Brigade and participate in open source. My most successful contribution is the ActiveInteraction gem with over 1.8k stars on GitHub.

While doing all of this I've gained a strong understanding of Ruby and I'm excited to share what I've learned.