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Summary of the wall of text below: How can I display accented characters (so they work via puts, etc) in Ruby?

Hello! I am writing a program for my class which will display some sentences in Spanish. When I try to use accented characters in Ruby, they do not display correctly (in the NetBeans output window (which displays accented characters in Java fine) or in the Command Prompt).

At first, some of my code didn't even run because the accented characters in my arrays where throwing off the Ruby interrupter (I guess?). I got errors like Ruby was expecting a closing bracket.

But I did some research, and found a solution, to add the following line of code to the beginning of my Ruby file:

# coding: utf-8

In NetBeans, my program ran regardless of this line. But I needed to add this line to get my program to run successfully in Command Prompt. (I don't know why.)

I'm still, however, having a problem actually displaying the characters to the screen. A word such as "será" will display in the NetBeans output window as "seré". And in the command prompt it draws little pipe characters (that I don't know how to type).

Doing some more research, I heard about:

$KCODE = 'UTF-8'

but I'm not having any luck with this.

I'm using Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 (I go back and forth between different machines).

Thanks, Derek

Derek
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1 Answers1

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A command prompt in Windows 7 has raster fonts by default. And it doesn't support unicode. At first, you should change cmd font to Lucida Console or Consolas. And then change the command prompt's codepage with chcp 65001. You can do it manually or add this line to your ruby programm:

# encoding: utf-8
`chcp 65001` #change cmd encoding to unicode
puts 'será test '
Vasiliy Ermolovich
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  • What I don't understand is: the NetBeans output console will display accented characters if I work in Java. In Ruby, it displays incorrect characters; even with your code. – Derek Apr 17 '11 at 00:08
  • Also, when I change the font in the cmd, it shows the correct character now, but with some weirdness. For example: será will be displayed with a question mark in a box immediately after the á, and it seems that characters that have a letter after the accent (e.g. serás) display with that letter copied twice (seráss). – Derek Apr 17 '11 at 00:14
  • Sorry, I don't know anything about NetBeans. With regard to windows cmd, I've noticed this weirdness too. There is some little hack: if you enter one space after your word (`puts 'será '`), everything will be ok. Sorry, I don't know why this happens but may be it'll help. – Vasiliy Ermolovich Apr 17 '11 at 07:42
  • It works for me in cmd, but what about latest netbeans version? Does it print it correctly using: `# coding: utf-8` – Junior Mayhé Nov 08 '12 at 12:10