unicode most common way to handle?

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We are applying Unicode to the Rails project.

Now, As I found in http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/howtouseunicodestrings,

it seems that we can either use abc.jlength (using jcode) or abc.chars.length.

From http://blog.shugo.net/articles/2005/09/16/why-jcode-rb It then states that jcode should be rewritten.

There are yet other alternatives:icu4r, unicode, utf8proc, characterencodings

My question is, what is the most common way to handle utf8 encoding.

It is confusing...

Thanks for any help! Arthur