Module | ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::String::Multibyte
In: | 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

chars()
is_utf8?()

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

is_utf8?(
mb_chars(
mb_chars()

## 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.

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