> There really is a problem if I take a string encoded with UTF-8 and try t= o > concatenate it with a string encoded with 8859-1 (or one of the more exot= ic > character sets). =A0What I have never understood (and the Ruby people hav= e > tried to educate me) is why, when I say "utf-8-string" + "8859-1-string", > Ruby can't just convert the latter to the encoding of the first, do the > concatenation and be done with it. Well, you could make this argument for anything. Why does 2 + "hey" not call to_s on the 2 automatically/ After all, you can convert 2 to "2" losslessly... there's a reason things are strongly typed. Also, I don't know the specifics of 8859-1, but there are some encodings that are just simply not compatible with each other. Try adding a UTF-8 string to an ASCII string, for example... Encodings are hard.