diff --git a/railties/environments/environment.rb b/railties/environments/environment.rb
index 45fd0d4165..4131c5cb16 100644
--- a/railties/environments/environment.rb
+++ b/railties/environments/environment.rb
@@ -3,6 +3,12 @@
 #
 # Be sure to restart your webserver when you modify this file.
 
+# Uncomment to set UTF-8 as the encoding for strings. The Ruby default
+# is US-ASCII (may differ on different platforms though). This setting is
+# required if you need to return non-ASCII UTF-8 strings from ActionWebService.
+#
+# $KCODE = 'UTF8'
+
 # The path to the root directory of your application.
 RAILS_ROOT = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..')