Parameters in String encode method in Ruby

Question

Related to this this. What is meant by binary here? Knows it is related to source format but not sure whether it is ASCII-8BIT.

string.encode!('UTF-8', 'binary', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: '')

Answer 1

With two positional arguments, they specify destination and source encoding respectively.

'binary' is an alias for 'ASCII-8BIT':

Encoding::BINARY.names
#=> ["ASCII-8BIT", "BINARY"]

Note that you can omit the second argument ('binary') if your string is already in binary encoding.