Hi Will,
I thought this was a problem with using a different version of Ruby to the version that the extension (Ferret or RMagick or whatever else) was compiled with. Ferret 0.10.9 was compiled with 1.8.4-20 and it sounds like you tried that so now I'm confused, especially since it didn't work when you tried building the extension yourself. Unfortunately I can't replicate the error here, otherwise I might be able to fix the problem. Could you tell me, does this cause an error on your system?
irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems' => true irb(main):002:0> require 'ferret' => true irb(main):003:0> "\t\t\t\t Hello".dump => "\"\\t\\t\\t\\t Hello\""
Cheers, Dave