From: Tom Link <micathom@...>
Date: 2009-02-16T14:20:47+09:00
Subject: Re: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII (ArgumentError)

> but now I know my program will puke
> on any text file with multibyte characters.

Not necessarily.

Here is a useful summary of encodings in 1.9:
http://blog.nuclearsquid.com/writings/ruby-1-9-encodings

Basically, you have script encoding, internal encoding, and external
encoding. In you case, you should probably read the files as ASCII8BIT
or binary, I guess.