Unicode characters in ruby

Ruby
1

Dear all,

Iam in process of parsing xml. I has stored the xml in a stringio buffer
and reading the xml character by character. I need to know how to deal
with unicode characters here.

  1. If unicode characters were present in xml how can i read the all
    65636 unicode characters.

  2. I have parsed xml declaration part and found the encoding

    <?xml encoding="UTF-8" ?>

    so now in above case after parsing my encoding value would be UTF-8.

    How to deal with utf-8, utf-16, etc and other encoding types while
    parsing xml.

please suggest me a way to proceed.

thanks in advance.

Regards,
Jose