title: Simple Conversion Of String To UTF-8 in Ruby 1.8
body: <p>I know that in Ruby 1.9 you can easily re-encode a string like this.</p>
  
  <pre><code>s = s.encode('UTF-8')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What is the equivalent in Ruby 1.8? What require lines does it need.</p>
  
  <p>All the tutorials I have seen are needlessly complicated and I don't understand what is going on.</p>