Ruby – Strings

In Ruby, you can find the encoding used like this:

irb(main):005:0* puts "abc".encoding
UTF-8
=> nil
irb(main):006:0>

You can change this by writing the follow special comment:

irb(main):005:0* puts "abc".encoding
UTF-8
=> nil
irb(main):006:0>
irb(main):002:0> # encoding: us-ascii
irb(main):003:0* puts "abc".encoding
US-ASCII
=> nil

In a ruby script, this encoding command has to appear on the first line of the file, or the second line, if the first line is a she-bang line, e.g.:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# encoding: UTF-8
.
.
.