I want ror to not use utf8. I have tried setting $KCODE to 'n'. Activercord still tries to convert my special characters to utf.
The character 'ê' comes as "\303\252'. I want it to show the ê WITHOUT using utf8. I have NO reason to use utf8. I do not know if this is a rails or ruby issue. Can someone please help?
I'd strongly recommend you reconsider that position - you've got to use some encoding to encode your text, what encoding do you want to use that is 'better' than utf-8 ?
There are multiple pieces to the problem:
- response to the user's browser need to state the correct character set (ActionController::Base.default_charset controls the default character set user) - your database should be set to use correct collation etc (eg a utf8 string is not sorted in the same way as a latin1 string, some sequences of bytes are not valid utf8 etc) - your data needs to actually be in that encoding: if you have existing content you will have to convert it all to this new encoding (and depending on your content there might not be a single encoding that covers all of them). - browser shenanigans
To my knowledge, active record itself doesn't do any conversion (beyond in some cases telling the adapter library what character set it expects) - you're probably seeing the browser encode what you type as utf-8
Fred