[brianmario]

Some people may not like it, but this is exactly why I chose to force UTF-8 for http://github.com/brianmario/mysql2 for all the strings you get back (in 1.9), and the connection itself. We've all dealt with improper use of encodings between applications, their persistence layer and their presentation. It's a nightmare unless you put your foot down and say "We're making everything Unicode, nothing comes in or leaves unless it is". This obviously doesn't work for everyone but it's my experience that it will work for 99% of all use cases.