Get pry to display characters like [äöüßÄÖÜß] (utf-8 encoding)? (Possibly Windows-specific issue?)

Question

[All the scripts I'm working with with these German characters are in UTF-8 themselves, have #encoding: utf-8 at the top (and Encoding.external_default = 'utf-8', not that that's really relevant I think because German chars in strings that are defined within the script don't get displayed right.)]

All these things display fine at the windows command prompt and using irb etc.

I can't even enter these characters at the pry prompt, though. Attempting to paste in puts "äöüÄÖÜß" gets puts ". Attempting to actually type them freezes pry somehow, and I have to ^D out.

Using pry, I ran a script with GC = "äöüÄÖÜß" in it, and this is the kind of garbledeegook I get:

[1] pry(main)> GC                               
=> "├ñ├Â├╝├ä├û├£├ƒ"                             
[2] pry(main)> GC.split('').each{ |c| puts c }  
ä                                              
├                                              
├╝                                              
Ä                                              
Ö                                              
Ü                                              
ß                                              
=> ["├ñ", "├Â", "├╝", "├ä", "├û", "├£", "├ƒ"]
[3] pry(main)> File.open("output.txt", 'w'){|f| GC.split('').each{ |c| f.puts c } }

The test file output.txt created by that last line, however, is in utf-8 and reads:

ä
ö
ü
Ä
Ö
Ü
ß

Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this?

Answer 1

I know that if you install Ruby with readline support, then you doesn't have this problem. To do so you will need something like this if you are using rbenv (with ruby-build):

RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--with-readline-dir=`brew --prefix readline`" rbenv install 1.9.3

I don't know if there are other solutions though.