I need to change the default ruby string encoding to UTF-8 in Heroku. For some reason it is US-ASCII. $ heroku console Ruby console for myapp.heroku.com >> "a".encoding => #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT> However, if I run irb locally I get a different result: $ irb ruby-1.9.2-p136 :001 > "a".encoding => #<Encoding:UTF-8> Both run on ruby 1.9.2. I've tried setting this as well, but didn't work: Encoding.def
