Having given up porting a medium-sized Rails application to Ruby 1.9 just last week I though I'd share some of my experience. Ruby 1.9's String implementation i

Having given up porting a medium-sized Rails application to Ruby 1.9 just last week I though I'd share some of my experience. Ruby 1.9's String implementation is fine, but will require lots of changing to existing code. Rails 2.3.5 is definitely _not_ ready for Ruby 1.9 and UTF-8. For example some regexps in helpers are not encoding aware, rack 1.0.1 which is required by 2.3.5 doesn't play nicely with encodings and many more small and annoying problems (template encoding for example; the app I was porting mostly uses HAML which supports Ruby 1.9's string encodings in the latest versions; but no luck for the few erb templates) All in all, this is a huge transition which will take a while to propagate through the hole Rails stack.