This patch does fix your test case and also allows ant test to run. Unfortunately, it breaks rubygems.

I have a patch which fixes your problem attached. It also runs ant test fine. However, it dies in RubyGems and it is getting late for me; So I figured I may as well dump what I have right now.

Tom, you started a fix...got some time to wrap up the last minor issues?

This could actually be a larger issue now that we have a byte[]-based String impl. We need to address interop before 1.0, which means it should be in for 0.9.9.

If there was an encoding problem before, it doesn't seem to be present anymore. However it seems like this may now be an issue of when to flush a file. If I change the code in t.rb from this:

File.new("rd-bug", "w").write(e)

to this:

File.open("rd-bug", "w") {|f| f.write(e)}

The file contents match the stdout output. This tells me that a bare write on an open file, without an explicit close, does not get flushed to disk. Correct Ruby behavior appears to be that streams should close and flush on exit. I will file that as a separate bug.