jaro_winkler is an implementation of Jaro-Winkler distance algorithm which is written in C extension and will fallback to pure Ruby version in platforms other than MRI/KRI like JRuby or Rubinius. Both of C and Ruby implementation support any kind of string encoding, such as UTF-8, EUC-JP, Big5, etc. WWW: https://github.com/tonytonyjan/jaro_winkler