Ruby Chinese character substring difficulties

For my rails site, there's some UI with only enough space to display the first 5 characters of a user's name. So I'm truncating the string to display as follows:

@user.name[0..4]

It works if the name is in English. But if @user.name contains Chinese (multibyte) characters, two problems arise. The first problem is that [0..4] only gives me 2 characters, not 5. The second problem is that sometimes the last character gets cut in half and garbage shows up on screen.

I was wondering if there's som开发者_JS百科e relatively clean way to handle substring-ing multibyte characters in ruby?

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Here's an excellent article about Ruby 1.8 and multibyte support (or, rather, the lack of it).

Based on what's there, you can try doing something like:

# this should get you first 4 characters of the string:
your_chinese_string.scan(/./mu)[0,4].join