String length/concat problems in Ruby 1.8.0?

Has anyone run into Ruby string length/concatenation problems in
Ruby 1.8.0? One of my associates encountered difficulties when
storing the output of a program into a string. The program outputs
only text so there are no issues concerning binary characters causing
the mess-up.

Rodman S. Regier wrote:

Has anyone run into Ruby string length/concatenation problems in
Ruby 1.8.0? One of my associates encountered difficulties when
storing the output of a program into a string. The program outputs
only text so there are no issues concerning binary characters causing
the mess-up.

Can you be more specific about what your colleague was attempting to do and what went wrong?

A code snippet would probably help, if possible.