Coming from Perl and C I have come to expect "\n" to be translated
differently depending on OS--especially when doing sockets protocol
programming. Ruby *appears* to be subject to this same OS/clib
translation issue which is so often overlooked. Was hoping Ruby
shielded the average user from this. Has anyone else had any experience
confirming or denying this? I've written up the details in a blog post:
http://rob.muhlestein.net/2007/01/watch-those-newlines-ruby-no-different.html
In Ruby "\n" is a string of lentght 1 in all systems, and it is equal to "\012" in all platforms. This works as in Perl and other languages that inherit from C the way newlines are handled[*], except it is simpler because it does not have the MacPerl exception.
In these languages you write portable sockets programming by binmodeing the socket and hard-coding "\015\012" or whatever.
As a side note, by default modern Perl performs newlines transaltion on CRLF platforms via the custom PerlIO I/O layer, the C Ruby interpreter delegates this to stdio.
-- fxn
[*] Radar – O’Reilly
On Jan 1, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Rob Muhlestein wrote:
Coming from Perl and C I have come to expect "\n" to be translated
differently depending on OS--especially when doing sockets protocol
programming. Ruby *appears* to be subject to this same OS/clib
translation issue which is so often overlooked. Was hoping Ruby
shielded the average user from this. Has anyone else had any experience
confirming or denying this? I've written up the details in a blog post:http://rob.muhlestein.net/2007/01/watch-those-newlines-ruby-no-different.html