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Last week, in the comments, Nikolai Weibull brought up his UTF-8 lib, a lovely creature which meets my own needs much better than what’s already out there. I like it much better than my own efforts. Especially now that he’s had some time to flesh it out.

Namely: It’s small. It’s coded in C. It locks into Ruby’s existing string class. Therefore, it can be efficient with memory and use Ruby’s own regexps.

 require 'encoding/character/utf-8'
 str = u"hëllö" 
 str.length
 #=> 5
 str.reverse.length
 #=> 5
 str[/ël/]
 #=> "ël" 

If you’d like to follow development, clone this (git-web.) I’ve also put up a gem: gem install character-encodings --source code.whytheluckystiff.net, but obviously it’s not an official release or anything.