See The File OLD_README for the proper documentation for this lovely
Gem.
My Fork does whatever it takes to make this gem work with Ruby 1.9 and correctly handle the multitude of different character encoding issues you're going to encounter if you ever use this in production.
This means it's totally and utterly broken for Ruby < 1.9.2 and that's the point really.
When I get time, I'll fix the tests too, since at the time of forking they don't even bloody run.