Ruby 1.9.2 changes and i18n on Mac OSX
We recently noticed some pretty interesting changes in ruby 1.9.2. It appears that require no longer allows relative paths and ruby is now more unicody. This means if you are in a directory with two files "foo.rb" and "bar.rb", you can no longer simply type "require 'foo'" inside bar.rb to use foo. Now, you need to either do "require './foo'" or "require_relative 'foo'". A potentially more difficult change is in how ruby handles character encodings. For the most part, this isn't a problem inside "normal" code and strings, but things get dicey if you start reading text files off a filesystem. This is especially dicey if you're doing this and you're on a mac AND you work with western european data AND it involves money. If you save a file with a currency symbol on a mac, then subsequently read the file on a machine (or a tool) that uses/assumes utf-8, you will not see €, you will see...