General Methods XP VX & ACE

[kyonides]

How to Get Rid of Those Weird Invisible Characters

 Let me guess... your username or a directory has a multibyte character or space inbetween that shouldn't be displayed on screen and now you're having this issue right?

Let us think this has been caused by a nasty character found in the environmental variable HOME.

Since we are working with Ruby 1.9 or below if talking about the RGSS based engines, this might only be solved by applying one of the following solutions:

Method #1 - Ruby 1.9

Code:

env_home = "#ENV['HOME']}/AppData/Local/game"
APPDATA = env_home.force_encoding("ascii-8bit").gsub(/\W+/,"")

Method #2 - Ruby 1.8 or 1.9

Code:

env_home = "#ENV['HOME']}/AppData/Local/game"
APPDATA = env_home.unpack("A*").to_s.gsub(/\\x\w{2}|\W+/,"")

Replace "" (nothing) with " " (a single space) if it's supposed to be a simple space there.
In this case, the order of the replacements of the matched regular expressions do matter here.

Other solutions might tell you that you need to use iconv, but it'd be way better for the average game developer to keep it as simple as possible as shown above.