Ruby converting string encoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 not working

Question

I am trying to convert a string from ISO-8859-1 encoding to UTF-8 but I can't seem to get it work. Here is an example of what I have done in irb.

irb(main):050:0> string = 'Norrlandsvägen'
=> "Norrlandsvägen"
irb(main):051:0> string.force_encoding('iso-8859-1')
=> "Norrlandsv\xC3\xA4gen"
irb(main):052:0> string = string.encode('utf-8')
=> "Norrlandsvägen" 

I am not sure why Norrlandsvägen in iso-8859-1 will be converted into Norrlandsvägen in utf-8.

I have tried encode, encode!, encode(destinationEncoding, originalEncoding), iconv, force_encoding, and all kinds of weird work-arounds I could think of but nothing seems to work. Can someone please help me/point me in the right direction?

Ruby newbie still pulling hair like crazy but feeling grateful for all the replies here... :)

Background of this question: I am writing a gem that will download an xml file from some websites (which will have iso-8859-1 encoding) and save it in a storage and I would like to convert it to utf-8 first. But words like Norrlandsvägen keep messing me up. Really any help would be greatly appreciated!

[UPDATE]: I realized running tests like this in the irb console might give me different behaviors so here is what I have in my actual code:

def convert_encoding(string, originalEncoding) 
  puts "#{string.encoding}" # ASCII-8BIT
  string.encode(originalEncoding)
  puts "#{string.encoding}" # still ASCII-8BIT
  string.encode!('utf-8')
end

but the last line gives me the following error:

Encoding::UndefinedConversionError - "\xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

Thanks to @Amadan's answer below, I noticed that \xC3 actually shows up in irb if you run:

irb(main):001:0> string = 'ä'
=> "ä"
irb(main):002:0> string.force_encoding('iso-8859-1')
=> "\xC3\xA4"

I have also tried to assign a new variable to the result of string.encode(originalEncoding) but got an even weirder error:

newString = string.encode(originalEncoding)
puts "#{newString.encoding}" # can't even get to this line...
newString.encode!('utf-8')

and the error is Encoding::UndefinedConversionError - "\xC3" to UTF-8 in conversion from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1

I am still quite lost in all of this encoding mess but I am really grateful for all the replies and help everyone has given me! Thanks a ton! :)

Answer 1

You assign a string, in UTF-8. It contains ä. UTF-8 represents ä with two bytes.

string = 'ä'
string.encoding
# => #<Encoding:UTF-8>
string.length
# 1
string.bytes
# [195, 164]

Then you force the bytes to be interpreted as if they were ISO-8859-1, without actually changing the underlying representation. This does not contain ä any more. It contains two characters, Ã and ¤.

string.force_encoding('iso-8859-1')
# => "\xC3\xA4"
string.length
# 2
string.bytes
# [195, 164]

Then you translate that into UTF-8. Since this is not reinterpretation but translation, you keep the two characters, but now encoded in UTF-8:

string = string.encode('utf-8')
# => "ä" 
string.length
# 2
string.bytes
# [195, 131, 194, 164]

What you are missing is the fact that you originally don't have an ISO-8859-1 string, as you would from your Web-service - you have gibberish. Fortunately, this is all in your console tests; if you read the response of the website using the proper input encoding, it should all work okay.

For your console test, let's demonstrate that if you start with a proper ISO-8859-1 string, it all works:

string = 'Norrlandsvägen'.encode('iso-8859-1')
# => "Norrlandsv\xE4gen"
string = string.encode('utf-8')
# => "Norrlandsvägen"

EDIT For your specific problem, this should work:

require 'net/https'
uri = URI.parse("https://rusta.easycruit.com/intranet/careerbuilder_se/export/xml/full")
options = {
  :use_ssl => uri.scheme == 'https', 
  :verify_mode => OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
}
response = Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port, options) do |https|
  https.request(Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.path))
end
body = response.body.force_encoding('ISO-8859-1').encode('UTF-8')