Strange module error with Hpricot

I got some strange error today when I tried to deploy one of my rails projects to my slice at slicehost. The problem was that I had a newer version of Hpricot running on the slice (0.6.161) versus 0.6 on my local machine. The following line failed:

Hpricot::XChar::PREDEFINED_U.merge!({" " => 32})

Ahm, okay. I didn’t see any changes made to the overall layout of Hpricot so I suspect that line should work. Any ideas?

(If anyone is interested in the meaning of the above line, check this ticket).