I was reading through "The Ruby Way" and noticed the sentence: "Because Ruby isn't fully internationalized at the time of this writing, a character is essentially the same as a byte." This implies that we may expect a character to be something other than a byte in the near future. I started to search the archives but thought that there are enough other newbies on this list that a summary of the plans would be useful to many of us. Would some knowledgeable person please post a synopsis of where Ruby is going in this area. It would be very helpful if it contained hints about how to write code that wont break during the transition. TIA, Chris -- Some people say Windows users have an inferiority complex. That's not true. It's not a complex.