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When asked about the future of Unicode in Ruby 1.9/2.0, Matz replied to Ruby-Core with the following laundry list of features he expects in Ruby’s multibyte character support:

• characters are represented by single character strings.
• so that "abc"[0] returns "a" instead of fixnum 97.
• all string methods are aware of multibyte characters.
• new method String#encoding gives character encoding name (e.g. "utf-8").
• new method IO#encoding gives character encoding name for reading data.
• new method IO#encoding= sets the character encoding for reading data.

A library which emulates this could be built, based on Ruby’s current iconv lib. Anybody want to take a stab at it?