# Issue with character encoding in http request

**URL:** <https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/issue-with-character-encoding-in-http-request/50623>\
**Category:** rubyonrails-talk\
**Created:** [April 2, 2010, 3:23pm UTC](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/issue-with-character-encoding-in-http-request/50623 "2010-04-02T15:23:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Christophe1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b3f665/32.png) [@Christophe1](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/u/Christophe1)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2010, 3:23pm UTC](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/issue-with-character-encoding-in-http-request/50623/1 "2010-04-02T15:23:39Z")

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Hi there,

I have an issue with character encoding on http request that I need to handle in my rails apps.

Here's an example of my log :

Processing MessagesController#incoming (for 217.117.146.164 at 2010-04-02 16:08:27) [GET] Parameters: {"action"=\>"incoming", "z"=\>"Je suis un bon ?l?ve.", "alias"=\>"33699425463", "controller"=\>"messages"} ... some db processing... Rendering messages/incoming Completed in 39ms (View: 2, DB: 27) | 200 OK [[http://server.mydomain.com/in/?z=Je+suis+un+bon+�l�ve.&alias=33699425463](http://server.mydomain.com/in/?z=Je+suis+un+bon+%E9l%E8ve.&alias=33699425463)]

As you can guess I expect the system to receive the z value decoded as "Je suis un bon élève." and not "Je suis un bon ?l?ve."

Anyone as faced this issue already ?

By the way, I cannot ask the request sender to change his encoding method... On the other hand, I've setup everything in my app to use utf-8 which works fine...

Thanks in advance,

Christophe

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**Author:** ![Frederick\_Cheung](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/rubyonrails/user_avatar/discuss.rubyonrails.org/frederick_cheung/32/3901_2.png) [@Frederick\_Cheung](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/u/Frederick_Cheung)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2010, 5:07pm UTC](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/issue-with-character-encoding-in-http-request/50623/2 "2010-04-02T17:07:49Z")

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> By the way, I cannot ask the request sender to change his encoding method... On the other hand, I've setup everything in my app to use utf-8 which works fine...

Well if you cannot change the sender then you don't have a choice - you'll have to convert the input (probably an iso latin varient) into utf8. The iconv library can handle a large number of encodings.

Fred

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**Author:** ![Christophe1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b3f665/32.png) [@Christophe1](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/u/Christophe1)\
**Post date:** [April 8, 2010, 7:19am UTC](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/issue-with-character-encoding-in-http-request/50623/3 "2010-04-08T07:19:29Z")

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Thanks a lot. I had some difficulties to find info about iconv, but it works. Christophe