Ruby character encoding problems in netbeans and command wíndow

Question

I use netbeans as development IDE and runs the application from cmd but have problems to display ISO 8859-1 characters like åäö correct in both cmd window and when I run the application from netbeans

Question: What is best practice to set it up

Right now I do

@output.puts indent + "V" + 132.chr + "lkommen till Ruby Camping!"

to get ä

My environment

>chcp 65001

Active code page: 65001

>ruby main.rb

Source encoding: <Encoding:US-ASCII>
Default external: #<Encoding:UTF-8>
Default internal: nil
Locale charmap: "CP65001"

where I have in the code

def self.printEncoding
    puts "Source encoding: #{__ENCODING__.inspect}" if defined? __ENCODING__
    if defined? Environment::Encoding
      puts "Default external: #{Encoding.default_external.inspect}"
      puts "Default internal: #{Encoding.default_internal.inspect}"
      puts "Locale charmap: #{ Encoding.locale_charmap.inspect}"
    end
    puts "LANG environment variable: #{ENV['LANG'].inspect}" unless ENV['LANG'].nil?
  end

>ruby -v ruby 1.9.1p378 (2010-01-10 revision 26273) [i386-mingw32]

Answer 1

If you want to use non-ASCII characters in your source file, you need to declare the encoding of the source file. The very first line of the source file (or the second, if you have a shebang line) needs to be a comment line which (roughly) matches the regexp

#.*?coding[:=]?\s+(.*)(?:\s+.*)?

In other words: a comment line which starts with some stuff, then contains the string coding followed by an optional symbol followed by a valid encoding name followed by some other stuff.

So, if you put

# coding: ISO-8859-1

at the top of your file, you should be okay. Note that the regexp is explicitly designed to be compatible with editors such as Vim:

# vim: fileencoding=UTF-8 ft=ruby syn=ruby ts=2 sw=2 ai eol et si

Or Emacs:

# *-* mode: ruby; coding: utf-8; tab-width: 2; indent-tabs-mode: nil *-*

One thing that always trips me up, is that Ruby does not always automatically transcode strings. You have to transcode them yourself:

puts 'ä'
# => ä

puts 'ä'.encode($>.external_encoding || Encoding.default_external)
# => ä