[nateberkopec]

Akira was talking about a specific context - view rendering. Which makes sense, who the hell ever renders a view in anything other than UTF-8?

Checking input, however, is a whole 'nother ballgame.

[steveklabnik]

He was talking about the view layer, that's true. Even then though, your source is likely to be in UTF-8, and Rails' form helpers add

  <form accept-charset="UTF-8">

so these days, the non-UTF-8 usage in Rails apps should be pretty tiny, I would think? It'd be stuff coming from outside of forms.