Language encoding

Ruby
1

I have written a simple answer-question programme (to be used in the
terminal) for students and I need French and German characters (à , ü
etc.):
I’ve written it in Emacs, on a mac, English keyboard and operating
system. It worked.
When I tried it on a Linux computer (English environment) it didn’t.
I then thought I figured it out: I chose utf-8 wherever possible in
Emacs (e.g. “set coding system for saving this buffer”, without
understanding what exactly I was doing, I’m afraid) and by including
$KCODE = ‘UTF-8’
require ‘jcode’
in my file (something I got from the “Ruby cookbook”). That worked –
on the Linux box. But the file no longer showed the correct
characters on the Mac. And it also didn’t on a Windows machine.

As I was planning to distribute the programme to the students on
Monday, and as I’m sure it won’t work on their mainly Windows boxes
running whatever language, I decided to ask for help here. You must
have understood from my question that any answer should be kept as
simple as possible…
Thanks in advance, Jörg.

Prof.Dr.med. Jörg Hagmann-Zanolari
Institute of Biochemistry and Genetics
DKBW, University of Basel
Mattenstrasse 28
CH-4058 Basel
Switzerland
Phone +41 (0)61 267 3565

2

On Jan 10, 2007, at 08:04, Jörg Hagmann wrote:

require ‘jcode’
in my file (something I got from the “Ruby cookbook”). That worked
– on the Linux box. But the file no longer showed the correct
characters on the Mac. And it also didn’t on a Windows machine.

If this is a terminal program then on the mac ensure that the
terminal character set encoding is set to UTF-8. You can find this
setting in the Display settings of the Window Settings dialog under
the Terminal menu.

Mattenstrasse 28
CH-4058 Basel
Switzerland
Phone +41 (0)61 267 3565

–
Eric H. - [email protected] - http://blog.segment7.net

I LIT YOUR GEM ON FIRE!