IRB escapes UTF characters

Question

I'm using OS-X (10.10.5) and rbenv (1.0.0) Ruby (2.2.4p230) and Fish Shell (2.2.0).

When I type non ASCII characters in irb they are automatically escaped.

max@MaxBook ~/p/sandbox> echo "Ö"
Ö
max@MaxBook ~/p/sandbox> irb 
irb(main):001:0> \U+FFC3\U+FFB6

I though at first this could be a problem with the shell or my Terminal settings but it only happens in IRB. Changing shells or ruby versions does not effect it.

I did not have this problem on my previous laptop which had an almost identical configuration. What is going on here?

Just as a data point for you, I use rvm and in Ruby 2.3 and JRuby 9000, the character "Ö" prints out as itself. — Keith Bennett, May 27 '16 at 09:49

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

You can enable unicode support in IRB by recompiling Ruby against readline (instead of libedit which would be the default).

First install readline for example with brew:

brew install readline

I use rbenv to manage Ruby versions and use the following line to install Ruby versions:

RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS=--with-readline-dir="$(brew --prefix readline)" rbenv install 2.3.1

With rvm it will look like:

rvm install 2.3.1 --with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr

Or when you might want to recompile Ruby from source, then this answer might help you.

IRB escapes UTF characters

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