Ruby Output Unicode Character

In newer versions of Ruby, you don't need to enforce encoding. Here is an example with 2.1.2:

2.1.2 :002 > "\u00BD"
 => "½"

Just make sure you use double quotes!

In Ruby 1.9.x+

Use String#encode:

checkmark = "\u2713"
puts checkmark.encode('utf-8')

prints

✓

puts '\u2713'.gsub(/\\u[\da-f]{4}/i) { |m| [m[-4..-1].to_i(16)].pack('U') }
✓

falsetru's answer is incorrect.

checkmark = "\u2713"
puts checkmark.encode('utf-8')

This transcodes the checkmark from the current system encoding to UTF-8 encoding. (That works only on a system whose default is already UTF-8.)

The correct answer is:

puts checkmark.force_encoding('utf-8')

This modifies the string's encoding, without modifying any character sequence.