You can fix most encoding problems with doing Encoding.default_internal = Encoding.default_external = "UTF-8" but as JEG states in http://blog.grayproductio

You can fix most encoding problems with doing Encoding.default_internal = Encoding.default_external = "UTF-8" but as JEG states in http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_three_default_encodings http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_three_defa..., this throws warnings and may still not fix things. Encoding issues rank up there with Array.to_s pains when moving to 1.9