Unintuitive error message when encoding is omitted

[blowfishpro]

Simplified example:

root = Kramdown::Element.new(:root)
root.children << Kramdown::Element.new(:text, 'stuff')
Kramdown::Converter::Kramdown.convert(root)

        2: from /Users/joey/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/kramdown-2.1.0/lib/kramdown/converter/base.rb:109:in `convert'
        1: from /Users/joey/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/kramdown-2.1.0/lib/kramdown/converter/base.rb:109:in `encode!'
TypeError (no implicit conversion of nil into String)

what works:

root = Kramdown::Element.new(:root, nil, nil, encoding: Encoding::UTF_8)

Now, it makes sense that an encoding is needed. But the error it produces doesn't really point to the source of the problem at all - I had to look at kramdown's source to figure out what was actually wrong.

[gettalong]

Thanks for pointing this out. It is rather rare that someone is building an AST from scratch, so there is not much support in terms of better error messages et al. I will update the respective code to make at least this error message better.

[gettalong]

Will be in the next release.

[blowfishpro]

Thanks!

For what it's worth I wasn't actually building from scratch. I was extracting part of an existing tree. But that required creating a new root.