The problems is correctly supporting multibyte strings. Unicode, the most complete character set, has several encodings (UTF-8 being the most popular one), each of them having some (or all) characters expressed with two or more bytes (unlike ASCII, for instance). In UTF-8, "abc" is a three-character string encoded in 3 bytes, but "čžš" (3 characters from Croatian alphabet) are encoded in 6 bytes (2 bytes each).
Multibyte-unaware programming languages (like Ruby and PHP < 6) assume 1 character = 1 byte. In Ruby, try string.reverse or string.length on strings containing special characters to see some unexpected results. Reverse will corrupt the string while length will report in bytes, not in characters. These are trivial examples, while the problem goes much deeper.
Rails needs this.
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Mislav
On 9/23/06, Peter Michaux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm interested in a general overview on what problem it fixes and why
it is needed. I don't know much about the whole unicode problem with
Ruby people keep bringing up and then other say it isn't really a
problem.
Peter
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