Why are you running away from PHP? What do you see wrong with PHP?
Unicode Support specifically, more generally lack of central vision for PHP (it grew organically), poor object orientation (having to use $this-> a million times in PHP 4), brainless configuration options that we will have to deal with forever if we want to write portable code (magic_quotes), no standard parameter ordering (strstr vs str_replace), weak typing (how many bugs are caused by programmer's unawareness of the conversion rules between booleans, ints, strings, arrays, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I've worked primarily in PHP for 6 years now, and it is a wonderful language for getting things done. It has functions for nearly everything you could possibly want, and it is ubiquitous on shared web hosts. That said, it's not an elegantly designed or implemented language. PHP 5 makes a lot of improvements, but ultimately they are stuck supporting flawed ideas from 10 years ago for backwards-compatibility.
Ruby on the other hand suffers from having a much smaller userbase, and thus less support for various libraries that are needed for specific purposes. That is no small hurdle if you need some specific functionality. Also, Ruby suffers from being quite a bit slower than PHP. On the other hand Ruby's vision is brilliantly elegant, borrowing the best features from numerous programming languages and wrapping them into a cohesive package that's truly a joy to use.
After trying to use Perl for web application development back in the day, PHP was a breath of fresh air. Now after years of using PHP and becomingly intimately aware of its shortcomings, Ruby is giving me that same feeling. If you're not well-versed in functional programming or haven't programmed in a wide variety of languages much of Ruby's beauty is likely to escape you at first. However, if you're serious about becoming a better programmer, exposure to Ruby (or at least Python) is a very good idea.
