Encode versus. force_encode in pure json about json

[mernen]

json has no particular handling for ASCII-8BIT, it just calls encode for anything that's not UTF-8. For a library, using force_encoding on binary strings is a rather dangerous assumption, and a senseless operation on any other encoding.

[samhendley]

Ok, i admit I am not an expert when it comes to encoding but it seemed strange to me because the first thing that is done after that step is utf8_to_json or utf9_to_json_ascii which calls ".force_encoding(::Encoding::ASCII_8BIT)" on the string. it seems very odd to force it ahead of time to UTF8 just to force it back to ascci-8bit, why couldn't it leave it as 8bit? since thats more of what it wants to be anyways?

[mernen]

I stand corrected: json does check for binary strings, and tries to detect its encoding (defaulting to UTF-8, see here). The problem here is that this string is stll not a valid UTF-8 sequence, and json is strict in parsing its input.