# Unicode most common way to handle?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unicode-most-common-way-to-handle/158075>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 19, 2009, 3:59am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unicode-most-common-way-to-handle/158075 "2009-01-19T03:59:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![artchrst](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/e36b37/32.png) [@artchrst](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/artchrst)\
**Post date:** [January 19, 2009, 3:59am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unicode-most-common-way-to-handle/158075/1 "2009-01-19T03:59:04Z")

</div>

We are applying Unicode to the Rails project.

Now, As I found in  
[http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/howtouseunicodestrings](http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/howtouseunicodestrings),

it seems that we can either use  
abc.jlength (using jcode)  
or  
abc.chars.length.

From [http://blog.shugo.net/articles/2005/09/16/why-jcode-rb](http://blog.shugo.net/articles/2005/09/16/why-jcode-rb)  
It then states that jcode should be rewritten.

There are yet other alternatives:icu4r, unicode, utf8proc,  
characterencodings

My question is, what is the most common way to handle utf8 encoding.

It is confusing…

Thanks for any help!  
Arthur