Cannot insert UTF-8 text

I can't seem to find a way to save UTF-8 data into Cassandra.

I'm using the cassandra gem 0.11.1 (https://github.com/fauna/cassandra/) which in turn uses thrift_client (0.6.2), which in turns uses the thrift library (0.6.0).

As an example, the following code[1]

cassandra.insert(:Cache, "123", {"unicode string" => "ä"})

will raise an exception:

Encoding::CompatibilityError: incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8

The stacktrace points to `thrift-0.6.0/lib/thrift/transport/framed_transport.rb:58`. What seems to be happening is that `@wbuf` is encoded as ASCII-8BIT, while `buf` is encoded as UTF-8, which causes the concatenation operation (<<) to fail with the exception above.

This issue might be connected to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-1023.

[1] Of course, this assumes a "cassandra" object created using the cassandra gem and a schema inizialized with a column family called "Cache"