Can't enter Umlauts in Ruby 1.9.3 IRB

Question

I am experiencing very strange behavior in Ruby 1.9.3\'s IRB with Mac OS 10.7.3 When I try to enter an Umlaut, it\'s escaped in the prompt and looks like this (I entered

Answer 1

I ran across this problem as well, but my Ruby was built with rvm rather than ruby-build. I'd also previously used Homebrew on Mountain Lion to run other package installers, and among them got Readline 6.2.5 or something like that. This turns out to be the cause of this issue for me. So here's the fix:

From the RVM site:

If you have an error when compiling pertaining to readline, you may need to attempt installing with the procedure defined below.

$ rvm pkg install readline

$ rvm reinstall 1.9.2 --with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr

Note that this error occurs most often when having a MacPorts, Fink, or Homebrew installed readline on your system.

Hope this helps someone else!