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Here’s the story thus far. Ruby has no Unicode support in 1.8 (except for Regexps), but it is forthcoming and Matz has stated his intentions. In the meantime, there’s been a quiet work to scrape up Unicode-aware String classes.

Today, Manfred Stienstra has lobbed a bunch of details on using the new UTF-8 encoding plugin for Rails. You can certainly use just the String class extensions in any other traditional Ruby stuff.

By creating this plugin we haven’t resolved all our problems. One of the biggest problems is that we can only process UTF-8 encoded strings. [...] Sure, there are solutions like iconv to re-encode this data, but life would be a lot simpler if we didn’t have to think about this.

This plugin by Julian Tarkhanov does require the Unicode library.