Why Strings?

They're everywhere!

As devs, you and I create tons of strings. Probably more than any other object on a day to day basis. How much do you really know about strings? How about encodings? How familiar are you with Unicode and UTF-8?

Do you know why this would happen?

'é' == 'é' # => false

Or why this length might be wrong?

'à'.length # => 2

Do you know what dummy encodings are?

Encoding::UTF_16.dummy? # => true

How about what this does?

[128077, 32, 128078].pack('U*')

Do you know how to use an encoding converter?