Ruby On Rails in UA/Rails plugins и фичи/Возвращаясь к содировке приложения

сегодян надыбал следующий код в rails инициализаторе
# For Ruby 1.8, this initialization sets $KCODE to 'u' to enable the
# multibyte safe operations. Plugin authors supporting other encodings
# should override this behaviour and set the relevant +default_charset+
# on ActionController::Base.
#
# For Ruby 1.9, this does nothing. Specify the default encoding in the Ruby
# shebang line if you don't want UTF-8.

def initialize_encoding $KCODE='u' if RUBY_VERSION < '1.9' end