Does Ruby share PHP's multibyte string problem?

[MarioN70]

PHP has a lot of trouble with multibyte strings (non-ASCII characters). The entire language was built assuming that each character is a byte. To solve this they invented the mb_strings functions which you can use instead of the standard functions (which work fine).\[code\]strlen($str);mb_strlen($str); // correct\[/code\]However, this is really a pain since you have to verify that the code you download/find online uses these functions or enable the \[code\]mb_string_overload\[/code\] which then might break some code that actually needs \[code\]char = byte\[/code\] calculations.Does Ruby share this problem?