How can I avoid putting the magic encoding comment on top of every UTF-8 file in Ruby 1.9?

Question

I have a Rails project with a lot of Cyrillic strings in it.

It worked fine on Ruby 1.8, but Ruby 1.9 assumes source files are US-ASCII-encoded unless you provide a

Answer 1

Explicit is better than implicit. Writing out the name of the encoding is good for your text editor, your interpreter, and anyone else who wants to look at the file. Different platforms have different defaults -- UTF-8, Windows-1252, Windows-1251, etc. -- and you will either hamper portability or platform integration if you automatically pick one over the other. Requiring more explicit encodings is a Good Thing.

It might be a good idea to integrate your Rails app with GetText. Then all of your UTF-8 strings will be isolated to a small number of translation files, and your Ruby modules will be clean ASCII.