Fear of Fish successfully answered Don Miguel de los Platanos's question:

What support does ruby have for internationalization? I have heard that ruby on rails doesn't support a large amount of character sets. I am in the midst of rolling out a international application and need to ofcourse make sure that rails can support every character set possible. Some I need initially are UTF8, Big 5, Shift JIS. Can rails handle this?

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Answers by: Rich Collins | Adam Thorsen | Fear of Fish | skwp

Adam Thorsen's Answer:

Reply by Adam Thorsen 920 days ago

Ruby is basically encoding agnostic. It just treats everything as binary data.

I'm pretty sure the database can only store information in one encoding.

Right now I have my DB set up to use UTF-8, which allows me to display pretty much any character set.

I'm not sure how it works but aren't Big 5 and Shift JIS subsets of Unicode, just like ASCII is?

Reply by Don Miguel de los Platanos 920 days ago

While it is a subset, its multibyte as opposed to a UTF8s single byte.