Use UNICODE-compatible regular expressions.

Even though english was enough for the lord to write the bible, it's still a smart idea to allow for UNICODE characters if only to allow horses to coöperate in a way the New Yorker would approve.

See:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Regexp.html#label-Character+Properties 
and 
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/04/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis.html
Use bundler and a Gemfile to manage local gems.