jamiecobbett

This video comes from a BBC series which can be watched here (from the UK at least): http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/

In a sentence, Ruby 1.8 Strings are just a set of bytes, so methods like length count the number of bytes, Ruby 1.9 Strings are a set of characters, so length counts characters. This makes a difference when you have multi-byte characters, and want an accurate length, a correct split, reverse etc.

I found this series of articles well worth the time to read and understand: http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/understanding_m17n

For Ruby, I can highly recommend this series of articles: http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/understanding_m17n

A binder clip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binder_clip