Q:

Ruby 1.9, Rails 2.3.9 and unicode characters in database and erb views, still a no go? 

I have a Rails application running on Rails 2.3.9.  It runs fine with ruby 1.8.7.  I'm testing it with ruby 1.9.2-head right now.  
The application loads fine until I try to load a page that relies on a unicode string.  Then I get the infamous encoding error:
ActionView::TemplateError (incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT) …
It looks like the problem is that I'm getting some strings from the database as ASCII-8BIT.  
I know Rails 3 works with ruby 1.9 and unicode fine.  I wonder if a solution has been backported to 2.3. 
So, is there any way to get unicode 2.3.9 rails apps working under ruby 1.9? 

A:

So I went ahead and wrote a plugin that fixes the two underlying issues that were causing encoding problems:

ActiveRecord models
Rails built-in helpers

See UnicodeOverride plugin on GitHub.