For non-English speaking programmers, it’s a bless that we can input some non-ASCII characters into ruby console directly for mocking data or something similar. But sometimes this might not work:
$ rvm install 1.9.3
In irb, the characters you input might turn out to be something like
\U+FFD1\U+FFD0\U+FFB5\U+FFD1\U+FFD1. That’s because of your installed ruby is not
compiled with readline support. Thanks to gists like this, the
solution is easy to google:
$ rvm get latest
$ rvm pkg install readline
$ rvm install 1.9.3 --with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr
This solution is available on rvm.io also.
But yesterday I encountered an issue a little bit different than this.
irb did not recognize my inputs at all, not even something like \U+FFD1.
After two hours of googling and recompilation, no solution works.
Then I checked the locale of my console (a little bit too late, I know):
$ locale
LANG="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=
Gotcha! Then I did two things
- checked my terminal configuration. make sure the character encoding is selected to UTF-8 and it will set LANG environment variable on startup. If you use iTerm2, check the same.
- changed my preference, System Preferences -> Language & Text -> Formats. The late configuration was China (English), which looks weird. I changed it to United States.
Finally it works.