Ruby – Strings – Encoding Solution

in this post, we will solve Ruby – Strings – Encoding HackerRank Solution. This problem (Ruby – Strings – Encoding) is a part of HackerRank Ruby series.

Problem

In Ruby, strings are objects of the String class, which defines a powerful set of operations and methods for manipulating text (e.g., indexing, searching, modifying, etc.). Here are a few easy ways to create Strings:

my_string = "Hello." # create a string from a literal
my_empty_string = String.new # create an empty string
my_copied_string = String.new(my_string) # copy a string to a new variable

Until Ruby 1.8, Strings were nothing but a collection of bytes. Data was indexed by byte count, size was in terms of number of bytes, and so on. Since Ruby 1.9, Strings have additional encoding information attached to the bytes which provides information on how to interpret them. For example, this code:

str = "With ♥!"
print("My String's encoding: ", str.encoding.name) 
print("\nMy String's size: ", str.size)
print("\nMy String's bytesize: ", str.bytesize)

produces this output:

My String's encoding: UTF-8
My String's size: 7
My String's bytesize: 9

You can make the following observations about the above code:

• The string literal creates an object which has several accessible methods.
• The string has attached encoding information indicating it’s an UTF-8 string.
• A String’s size corresponds to the umber of characters we see.
• A String’s bytesize corresponds to the actual space taken by the characters in memory (the ♥ symbol requires 3 bytes instead of 1).

Although UTF-8 is the most popular (and recommended) encoding style for content, Ruby supports 100 other encodings (try puts Encoding.list for the full list). With this in mind, we should learn how to convert between different encodings.

Task

In this challenge, we practice setting the encoding information for some string of text using Ruby’s Encoding methods. Write a function named transcode which takes a ISO-8859-1 encoded string as a parameter, converts it to an UTF-8 encoded string, and returns the result.

Input Format

Our hidden code checker will call your function, passing it an ISO-8859-1 encoded string as an argument.

Constraints

• Your function must be named transcode.

Output Format

Your function must return an UTF-8 encoded string.

Solution – Ruby – Strings – Encoding Solution

# Enter your code here. 
def transcode(my_string)
    my_string.force_encoding("utf-8")
end    

Note: This problem (Ruby – Strings – Encoding) is generated by HackerRank but the solution is provided by CodingBroz. This tutorial is only for Educational and Learning purpose.