"The call came down from on high just before the Ruby 1.9 release: replace the standard csv.rb library with faster_csv.rb. With only hours to make the change it was a little harder than I expected. The FasterCSV code base was pretty vanilla Ruby, but it required more work than I would have guessed to get running on Ruby 1.9. Let me share a few of the tips I learned while doctoring the code in the hope that it will help others get their code ready for Ruby 1.9..."