What does NSString.to_s do when the string isn't ASCII?

ruby-talk
1

A ruby/cocoa question, maybe someone here has an idea?

  • What does NSString.to_s do when the string isn’t ASCII?

I initialized it with a UCS-2 string with an accented e (e’):

irb(main):045:0> s =
OSX::NSString.alloc.initWithCharacters("\x00\x64\x00\xe9\x00\x70",
:length, 3)
#<OSX::OCObject:0xcad6c class=‘NSCFString’ id=0x227ea0>
irb(main):046:0> s.to_s
"d\216p"

Where does \216 come from? I thought it might be the latin1/iso-8859-1
encoding of an e’, but it isn’t.

irb(main):050:0> s.UTF8String
"d\303\251p"

I think having to_s return a UTF-8 string as the default would be a good
policy! Any other choice is going to leave some character sets out.

Any thoughts or explanations?

Sam