Crystal 0.12.0 has been released!
The major feature of this release is IO encoding support.
Strings in Crystal always denote UTF-8 encoded characters. Before this release, if you read a file whose encoding wasn’t UTF-8 the String ended with invalid byte sequences, and there was no way to specify the encoding.
Now you can do it, both for writing and reading. For example, to read a file encoded in, say, GB2312, you do:
File.read("file.txt", encoding: "GB2312")
The encoding can be set on all IOs (files, sockets, pipes, memory):
# Write a string encoded in GB2312 in memory
io = MemoryIO.new
io.set_encoding "GB2312"
io.print "你好"
# See the resulting bytes
io.rewind
puts io.to_slice # => [196, 227, 186, 195]
Additionally, HTTP::Client will use the charset specified in the Content-Type header so you can now fetch non-UTF-8 web sites.