encoding

There’s some irony in how difficult Ruby can be with different character sets considering it was written by someone who doesn’t speak English natively. I don’t want to get political here, so I’m just going to mention some encoding strangeness. Ruby 1.9 is much improved over Ruby 1.8, but I don’t know that defaulting to US-ASCII encoding is a good one. I suppose so, if one wishes to be more explicit with some sort of default.