Nick Snels asked:
> I'm trying to get regular expressions to work with a string that
> contains letters with accents. ...
>
> The regexp /patiõÏten/ matches the word patiõÏten. However when I do the
> regexp /kiné¯, I get the error 'premature end of regular expression:
> /kiné¯ (SyntaxError)'. Can anybody tell me what is going on?

You might avoid the syntax error by setting $KCODE = "u" at the start of 
your program.

> Another
> issue with the same sentence is, when I use the regexp /\s/ to highlight
> all the spaces, the space between 'kinweet' is not highlighted as a
> space. It seems like regular expressions cann't handle non-ascii
> characters at the end of a string.

Ruby strings are made up of bytes, not characters. That's the cause of the 
issues you're having. There are a couple of recent plugins for Ruby to help 
improve the situation (see 
http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/unicodeLibForRuby18.html) but they're far 
from perfect.

I hope $KCODE can clear up most of your problems, though.

Cheers,
Dave