to parse UTF-8 strings containing multibyte characters.
A Latin1 <-> UTF-8 conversion hack btw can be found here:
http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/fxruby-users/2005-September/000480.html
For comparison just drop the u option!
string = "abc\303\244" # \303\244 stands for รค puts string.scan(/./u).size puts string.split(//u).reverse.join puts string.gsub(/.$/u, '') regex = Regexp.new(/..../u) md = regex.match(string) puts md[0].inspect