Re: ActiveSupport::Multibyte for better Unicode support

On 26 Sep 2006, at 01:15 , Sam Ruby wrote:
> Michael Koziarski wrote:
> > > You mean they would get mad if Rails _did_ support UTF-8 out of  
> > > the box?
> >
> > Yeah, UTF-8 and unicode aren't terribly popular in japan. For more  
> > information than you ever thought you'd want, you can read up on  
> > the Han unification. It's also much less efficient (space wise)  
> > than their 'legacy' encodings.
>
> Java and C# seem to do OK in Japan.

And for good reason. I have yet to see an example of something that  
you can do in Shift-JIS and EUC that you can't do with Unicode 5  
encoded as UTF-8. I'm not saying there are no issues some people feel  
strongly about, but there are certainly no compelling technical or  
practical reasons why you can't use Unicode in Japan.

Even so, Ruby supports Shift-JIS and EUC and will continue to.  
Because Rails gets so much out of Ruby it would be somewhat rude if  
the next Rails release were to make it impossible to use these encoding.

That's _exactly_ why ActiveSupport::Multibyte is designed to support  
multiple encodings. The only reason Shift-JIS and EUC are currently  
not implemented in ActiveSupport::Multibyte is that we don't feel  
comfortable building stuff we don't use.

So, if you need Shift-JIS or EUC, please add it to  
ActiveSupport::Multibyte and send us a patch.

For more information see the Multibyte for Rails FAQ:

https://fngtps.com/projects/multibyte_for_rails/wiki/FAQ

Kind regards,
Thijs

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