Tested on Ruby 2.0.0-preview and 1.9.3 on Mac OS X 1.9.3x86_64-darwin11.4.0 Inline string works as expected Source encoding: UTF-8 External encoding: UTF-8 Name: "./Testé.txt" Encoding: UTF-8 Chars: [".", "/", "T", "e", "s", "t", "é", ".", "t", "x", "t"] Codepoints: [46, 47, 84, 101, 115, 116, 233, 46, 116, 120, 116] Bytes: [46, 47, 84, 101, 115, 116, 195, 169, 46, 116, 120, 116] Testing string ./Testé.txt ./TestTEST.txt File name from Dir.glob does not Source encoding: UTF-8 External encoding: UTF-8 Name: "./Testé.txt" Encoding: UTF-8 Chars: [".", "/", "T", "e", "s", "t", "e", "́", ".", "t", "x", "t"] Codepoints: [46, 47, 84, 101, 115, 116, 101, 769, 46, 116, 120, 116] Bytes: [46, 47, 84, 101, 115, 116, 101, 204, 129, 46, 116, 120, 116] Testing string ./Testé.txt ./Testé.txt Source encoding: UTF-8 External encoding: UTF-8 Name: "./Testé.txt" Encoding: UTF-8 Chars: [".", "/", "T", "e", "s", "t", "é", ".", "t", "x", "t"] Codepoints: [46, 47, 84, 101, 115, 116, 233, 46, 116, 120, 116] Bytes: [46, 47, 84, 101, 115, 116, 195, 169, 46, 116, 120, 116] Testing string ./Testé.txt ./TestTEST.txt