Unicode most common way to handle?

We are applying Unicode to the Rails project.

Now, As I found in
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/howtouseunicodestrings,

it seems that we can either use
abc.jlength (using jcode)
or
abc.chars.length.

From http://blog.shugo.net/articles/2005/09/16/why-jcode-rb
It then states that jcode should be rewritten.

There are yet other alternatives:icu4r, unicode, utf8proc,
characterencodings

My question is, what is the most common way to handle utf8 encoding.

It is confusing…

Thanks for any help!
Arthur