According to the question, it doesn't work when the code is by itself, but works when require "stringio" is added.
Andrew Grimm pretty much hit the nail on the head with his original comment on this question. The missing require 'stringio' is indeed the issue. But it is a bug with Rails, more specifically ActiveSupport 3.0.9 (which is where the error seems to be coming from).
We can trace it down using the git commit history of rails.
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