Dealing with string encoding is sometimes a PITA. But I think as English speakers, we are usually sheltered from the problem because most programming languages

Dealing with string encoding is sometimes a PITA. But I think as English speakers, we are usually sheltered from the problem because most programming languages are English centric. I'd like to hear opinions from people who don't speak English. If you think the way 1.8 handles (or doesn't handle) encoding is just fine, try things you typically do, but with a different language. For example: ruby -ryaml -e'p YAML.dump("こんにちは！")' You might also try things like inserting in to a database, parsing documents, etc. IMO, not having an encoding associated with some text sucks if you're a non-english speaker.