Ruby

Does that preserve the encoding of the String though?

What about String#inspect, does it also eval() to itself?

Eregon (Benoit Daloze) wrote:

Does that preserve the encoding of the String though?

The short answer: yes.

If the encoding is ASCII-compatible, it is preserved via its encoding of the resulting string.

s = "Hello こんにちは".encode("Windows-31J") s = s.dump puts s #=> "Hello \x82\xB1\x82\xF1\x82\xC9\x82\xBF\x82\xCD" p s.encoding #=> #<Encoding:Windows-31J> s = eval(s) p s.encoding #=> #<Encoding:Windows-31J> puts s.encode("UTF-8") #=> Hello こんにちは 

If the encoding is not ASCII-compatible, the dumped string has an explicit force_encoding.

s = "Hello こんにちは".encode("UTF-16LE") s = s.dump puts s #=> "H\x00e\x00l\x00l\x00o\x00 \x00S0\x930k0a0o0".dup.force_encoding("UTF-16LE") s = eval(s) puts s.encode("UTF-8") #=> Hello こんにちは 

I guess that there might be other subtle edge cases that I don't know. It is difficult for me to write the detailed document.

What about String#inspect, does it also eval() to itself?

No, it is not guaranteed. String#inspect is just for human, so there is no annoying hack like the above non-ASCII-compatible encoding. (I have encountered another subtle case, but I cannot remember...)