Ruby strings

Do Ruby strings suck, or do they actually have support for multibyte characters and different encodings? Googling seems to suggest the former.

>>7
No unicode. It's one of the things slated for Ruby 2.0, which they're working on now. They're also working on a significant speed-bump.

Of course, when Ruby2 comes out is another question. It could be next month, or it could be in a couple years. :(