I'm not a Ruby dev by trade, but am using Capistrano for PHP deployments. I'm trying to cleanup the output of my script and am trying to add a unicode check mark as discussed in this blog.
The problem is if I do:
checkmark = "\u2713"
puts checkmark
It outputs "\u2713" instead of ✓
I've googled around and I just can't find anywhere that discusses this.
TLDR: How do I puts or print the unicode checkmark U-2713?
EDIT
I am running Ruby 1.8.7 on my Mac (OSX Lion) so cannot use the encode method. My shell is Bash in iTerm2.
UPDATE [4/8/2019] Added reference image in case site ever goes down.
In Ruby 1.9.x+
Use String#encode:
checkmark = "\u2713"
puts checkmark.encode('utf-8')
prints
✓
In Ruby 1.8.7
puts '\u2713'.gsub(/\\u[\da-f]{4}/i) { |m| [m[-4..-1].to_i(16)].pack('U') }
✓
falsetru's answer is incorrect.
checkmark = "\u2713"
puts checkmark.encode('utf-8')
This transcodes the checkmark from the current system encoding to UTF-8 encoding. (That works only on a system whose default is already UTF-8.)
The correct answer is:
puts checkmark.force_encoding('utf-8')
This modifies the string's encoding, without modifying any character sequence.
In newer versions of Ruby, you don't need to enforce encoding. Here is an example with 2.1.2:
2.1.2 :002 > "\u00BD"
=> "½"
Just make sure you use double quotes!
Same goes as above in ERB, no forced encoding required, works perfectly, tested at Ruby 2.3.0
<%= "\u00BD" %>
Much appreciation
As an additional note, if you want to print an emoji, you have to surround it with braces.
irb(main):001:0> "\u{1F600}"
=> "😀"
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18492664/ruby-output-unicode-character