How to convert a string to UTF8 in Ruby

ruby file encoding utf-8 dump
ciembor picture ciembor · Jun 10, 2013 · Viewed 92.9k times · Source

I'm writing a crawler which uses Hpricot. It downloads a list of strings from some webpage, then I try to write it to the file. Something is wrong with the encoding:

"\xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

I have items which are rendered on a webpage and printed this way: 

Développement

the str.encoding returns UTF-8, so force_encoding('UTF-8') doesn't help. How may I convert this to readable UTF-8?

Answer

Stefan picture Stefan · Jun 10, 2013

Your string seems to have been encoded the wrong way round:

"Développement".encode("iso-8859-1").force_encoding("utf-8")
#=> "Développement"

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