An Encoding instance represents a character encoding usable in Ruby. It is defined as a constant under the Encoding namespace. It has a name and optionally, aliases: Encoding::ISO_8859_1.name #=> #<Encoding:ISO-8859-1> Encoding::ISO_8859_1.names #=> ["ISO-8859-1", "ISO8859-1"] Ruby methods dealing with encodings return or accept Encoding instances as arguments (when a method accepts an Encoding in