I agree. I'd say a good 5% of development time on a new Ruby 1.9 project of mine has been spent dealing with strings. I've taken to the idea that as long as _ev

I agree. I'd say a good 5% of development time on a new Ruby 1.9 project of mine has been spent dealing with strings. I've taken to the idea that as long as _everything_ is UTF-8, then I'll be okay, but good luck enforcing that! Especially since the whole word seems to default to ASCII, while actually _using_ multi-byte chars anyway. I think I've got it now, but no, not really. It just works on my development machine. On my server, where it actually counts, I'm getting garbage where I should be getting an accent. I've spend two days now just trying to figure out how to debug something like that!