Hi, ----- Original Message ----- From: "Yukihiro Matsumoto" <matz / ruby-lang.org> To: <ruby-core / ruby-lang.org> Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 3:03 PM > If you can do implicit conversion at I/O, why do you have to care > about encoding mixing? Your program should treat single encoding > anyway. Auto-conversion is bad, believe me. I/O is only one way I can get data. For example, when I get data via HTTP, how do I control what encoding Ruby's libraries are going to use to return data? I assume I'll get whatever encoding is specified in the HTTP header, so I'll have to remember to convert to UTF-8. It is dangerous to assume that I'll always get UTF-8 data via HTTP. Mike