harper wrote:
say i have a string and want to display only the first 10 characters or so:
shortstring = "this is a very long string object"[0..10] # shortstring = "this is a " # which is great
but if i use the same method on a utf8 string, i get some weird characters popping in there, sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Neither Ruby nor Rails natively supports UTF-8. The built-in string functions are assuming single-byte characters, which is why it's returning weird results for the double-byte characters in your UTF-8 string.
This page on the wiki may help:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings
Chris