# StringScanner and UTF-8 in ruby 1.9

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/stringscanner-and-utf-8-in-ruby-1-9/175600>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [September 16, 2009, 10:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/stringscanner-and-utf-8-in-ruby-1-9/175600 "2009-09-16T10:28:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![crocco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/fbc32d/32.png) [@crocco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/crocco)\
**Post date:** [September 16, 2009, 10:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/stringscanner-and-utf-8-in-ruby-1-9/175600/1 "2009-09-16T10:28:08Z")

</div>

I’ve recently switched to ruby 1.9 and I’m having problems using its  
multilingual features. Now I’m having a problem with StringScanner. It  
seems  
that, when working with multi-byte encodings, such as utf-8, its pos  
method  
returns a position in bytes, rather than in characters. For instance,  
the  
following code (when the source encoding is set to utf-8) outputs 2:

s = StringScanner.new “èa”  
s.scan(/./)  
puts s.pos

(If you can’t see it correctly, the string passed to StringScanner.new  
is made  
of two characters: the first is an “e” with a grave accent and the  
second is a  
“a”). If I replace the first character with an ASCII character, the  
output is

1. This clearly hints that StringScanner#pos gives a position in terms  
of  
bytes rather than characters. Does anyone know whether there’s a way to  
have  
it return the position in characters rather than in bytes, or to convert  
it  
from bytes to characters?

I noticed that StringScanner has a get\_byte methd and a getch method,  
which  
return the next byte and the next character respectively, so I can’t  
help  
wondering why something similar hasn’t been provided for pos. Do you  
think  
there’s a reason for this, or should it be reported as a bug? (or am I  
missing  
something obvious?)

Thanks in advance

Stefano