# Cursed curses

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cursed-curses/122381>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [December 7, 2007, 5:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cursed-curses/122381 "2007-12-07T05:27:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Michal\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@Michal\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Michal_S)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2007, 5:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cursed-curses/122381/1 "2007-12-07T05:27:06Z")

</div>

Hello

For me, the curses extension is quite flawed.

I could not find Curses (nor Readline) documentation neither on  
ruby-doc nor in my local ri.

The Curses documentation can be supplemented with curses man pages quite  
well.

However, it does not answer the fundamental and ruby-specific  
question: what does Ruby do with the characters?

I tried displaying UTF-8 with -KU and -KN, and both produce different  
garbage.

Then I tried to run in luit and transcode the output with iconv to an  
8-bit encoding. Yet another flavour of garbage.

For 7bit ASCII it works fine, and the characters that happen to be  
same in ISO8859-1 and UTF-8 also seem correct in one of the favours  
(haven’t checked thoroughly) but I cannot get all the characters from  
ISO8859-2 displayed.

Sample: žščřďťňľáéěíóúůŽŠČŘĎŤŇĽÁÉÍÓÚŮ - these should fit into single  
8-bit encoding - ISO8859-2

Thanks

Michal