Handling ASCII and Unicode in Ruby

Introduction

When working with text in Ruby, it's important to understand how to handle ASCII and Unicode characters. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that uses 7-bit binary numbers to represent characters. Unicode, on the other hand, is a character encoding standard that uses variable-length binary numbers to represent characters from different languages and scripts.

ASCII in Ruby

Ruby has built-in support for ASCII characters, which are represented by integers ranging from 0 to 127. You can convert ASCII characters to integers using the ord method:

char = 'A'
ascii_value = char.ord
puts ascii_value

You can also convert integers to ASCII characters using the chr method:

ascii_value = 65
char = ascii_value.chr
puts char

Unicode in Ruby

Unicode characters in Ruby are represented by integers ranging from 0 to 2^21-1. You can convert Unicode characters to integers using the ord method:

char = '😊'
unicode_value = char.ord
puts unicode_value

You can also convert integers to Unicode characters using the chr method:

unicode_value = 128522
char = unicode_value.chr(Encoding::UTF_8)
puts char

Encoding

When working with Unicode characters in Ruby, it's important to specify the encoding. Ruby supports several encodings, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. You can specify the encoding when converting integers to characters using the chr method, as shown in the previous examples.

String Encoding

Strings in Ruby have an associated encoding, which determines how characters are represented internally. You can check the encoding of a string using the encoding method:

str = 'Hello'
puts str.encoding

You can also force a string to a specific encoding using the force_encoding method:

str = 'Hello'
str.force_encoding(Encoding::UTF_8)
puts str.encoding

Handling ASCII and Unicode Characters

When working with ASCII and Unicode characters in Ruby, it's important to be mindful of the encoding and to properly convert between integers and characters. By understanding how to handle ASCII and Unicode characters, you can ensure that your Ruby code works correctly with text from different languages and scripts.

Summary

ASCII characters are represented by integers ranging from 0 to 127.
Unicode characters are represented by integers ranging from 0 to 2^21-1.
Specify the encoding when working with Unicode characters in Ruby.
Check and force the encoding of strings in Ruby.