Issue #20210 has been updated by nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada). Tracker changed from Misc to Feature I don't remember the reason to select `ArgumentError`, `SyntaxError` feels more reasonable. https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/9701 ---------------------------------------- Feature #20210: Invalid source encoding raises ArgumentError, not SyntaxError https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20210#change-106462 * Author: kddnewton (Kevin Newton) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal ---------------------------------------- I was hoping we could change the error that is raised when an invalid source encoding is found from an ArgumentError to a SyntaxError. First let me say, if this isn't possible for backward compatibility, I understand. Please do not take this as me not caring about backward compatibility. Right now, if you have the script `# encoding: foo\n"bar"`, it will raise an ArgumentError, not a SyntaxError. If there are other syntax errors in the file, there's no way to concat them together to give feedback to the user. If a user wants to consistently handle the errors coming back from a parse, they currently have to rescue ArgumentError and SyntaxError. Ideally it would all be SyntaxError, so we could handle them consistently and append all errors together. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/