Set UTF-8 as default for Ruby 1.9.3

Question

I\'m on Rails 4 and Ruby 1.9.3

I use \"strange\" characters very often, so I have to declare UTF-8 encoding at the top of all .rb files.

Is there any way to

Answer 1

in Ruby 1.9 the default is ASCII

in Ruby 2.0 the default is UTF-8.

change Ruby version

or

config.encoding = "utf-8" # application.rb

and in your database.yml

development:
     adapter:  your_db
     host:     localhost
     encoding: utf8