Hi,

I am pretty new to ruby and I am very happy with what I have seen so far! I
also bought the book, which seems very good (haven't read all of it yet
though).

I currently have one question, about the support for UTF-8. I have poked
around both in the book and in the source but I haven't found what I am
looking for, so here goes:

Is there any support for reading and writing UTF-8 encoded streams and
having them translated to "internal" format (i.e. 8bit)? I would like to be
able to read stuff from e.g. sockets (or where ever actually :-), and have
it translated to/from UTF-8 (like what is possible with e.g. java streams).

I have noticed that there are command line options to turn on UTF-8 and
other encodings, can I use this in some way?

There are scattered remarks (and source!) making me believe that this is
possible and indeed supported, but I have yet to figure out how!

/johan