Hiya just hoping someone can shed some light on this. If i were to prompt the user to enter a search parameter to look across a bigger string of text using: print "please enter search term: " stdout.flush string1 = gets.chomp i run into trouble when the user enters non english search terms. how can i set this up to allow the user to enter other language words? chinese/russian/etc. thanks, seems like a simple question... but i couldn't find anything on it in the forums -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.