Module ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::String::Multibyte
In: vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/multibyte.rb

Implements multibyte methods for easier access to multibyte characters in a String instance.

Methods

chars   is_utf8?   is_utf8?   mb_chars   mb_chars  

Public Instance methods

[Source]

    # File vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/multibyte.rb, line 57
57:             def chars
58:               ActiveSupport::Deprecation.warn('String#chars has been deprecated in favor of String#mb_chars.', caller)
59:               mb_chars
60:             end

Returns true if the string has UTF-8 semantics (a String used for purely byte resources is unlikely to have them), returns false otherwise.

[Source]

    # File vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/multibyte.rb, line 52
52:           def is_utf8?
53:             ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars.consumes?(self)
54:           end

[Source]

    # File vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/multibyte.rb, line 67
67:           def is_utf8? #:nodoc
68:             case encoding
69:             when Encoding::UTF_8
70:               valid_encoding?
71:             when Encoding::ASCII_8BIT, Encoding::US_ASCII
72:               dup.force_encoding(Encoding::UTF_8).valid_encoding?
73:             else
74:               false
75:             end
76:           end

[Source]

    # File vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/multibyte.rb, line 63
63:           def mb_chars #:nodoc
64:             self
65:           end

Multibyte proxy

mb_chars is a multibyte safe proxy for string methods.

In Ruby 1.8 and older it creates and returns an instance of the ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars class which encapsulates the original string. A Unicode safe version of all the String methods are defined on this proxy class. If the proxy class doesn‘t respond to a certain method, it‘s forwarded to the encapsuled string.

  name = 'Claus Müller'
  name.reverse  #=> "rell??M sualC"
  name.length   #=> 13

  name.mb_chars.reverse.to_s   #=> "rellüM sualC"
  name.mb_chars.length         #=> 12

In Ruby 1.9 and newer mb_chars returns self because String is (mostly) encoding aware. This means that it becomes easy to run one version of your code on multiple Ruby versions.

Method chaining

All the methods on the Chars proxy which normally return a string will return a Chars object. This allows method chaining on the result of any of these methods.

  name.mb_chars.reverse.length #=> 12

Interoperability and configuration

The Chars object tries to be as interchangeable with String objects as possible: sorting and comparing between String and Char work like expected. The bang! methods change the internal string representation in the Chars object. Interoperability problems can be resolved easily with a to_s call.

For more information about the methods defined on the Chars proxy see ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars. For information about how to change the default Multibyte behaviour see ActiveSupport::Multibyte.

[Source]

    # File vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/multibyte.rb, line 42
42:           def mb_chars
43:             if ActiveSupport::Multibyte.proxy_class.wants?(self)
44:               ActiveSupport::Multibyte.proxy_class.new(self)
45:             else
46:               self
47:             end
48:           end

[Validate]