Unicode in Regex

Unicode in Regex - Ruby Forum:

> Regular expressions for all character work would be a *terribly* slow > way to get things done. If you want to get the nth character, should you > do a match for n-1 characters and a group to grab the nth? Or would it > be better if you could just index into the string and have it do the Ok, I'm not very familiar with the internal working of strings in 1.9, but it seems to me that for character sets with variable byte size, it is logically *impossible* to directly index into the string. Unless there's some trick I'm unaware of, you *have* to count from the beginning of the string for utf8 strings. > right thing? How about if you want to iterate over all characters in a > string? Should the iterating code have to know about the encoding? > Should you use a regex to peel off one character at a time? That is certainly one possible way of doing things... string.scan(/./){ |c...

Full article: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/133538