Issue #2043 has been updated by Yui NARUSE. http://jp.rubyist.net/magazine/?0025-Ruby19_m17n http://yokolet.blogspot.com/2009/07/design-and-implementation-of-ruby-m17n.html I wrote above but in Japanese, second is its translation. http://github.com/candlerb/string19/tree/master James' and string19 is also well documented. People in ISO 8859 may think why Unicode is not a super set of Windows-1252. In Japan, because of lack of standard conversion tables between Japanese legacy encoding (Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP) and Unicode, vendors use different tables. This sad situation made that Unicode is not a simple super set of legacy. Ruby 1.9 inherits this. If wide consensus for the standard table was made before Ruby 2.0, Ruby 2.0 may have automatic conversion (or Unicode comes to be the internal code). ---------------------------------------- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/2043 ---------------------------------------- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org