Screwed Special Characters in an utf8 String Read From Database

Hello, I have a mysql database with a InnoDB table in utf8_general_ci encoding. Inside this table there is a column "path", varchar(255), utf8_general_ci.

What I am trying to do now, is to use this path from the database to look up a local file and transmit this file to the user. The problem is, that my program is not able to open any files, that contain special characters (e.g. ÄÖÜ.txt) in their path (without special characters its fine). In these cases, the path-string seems to be screwed (if I print it to the console it is "ÄÃ-ÃOE.txt").

However, when I show the pathname inside the browser, or look at it in the database (phpmyadmin), the special characters seem to be correct. I already added the "encoding: utf8" line to my database.yml file, so this shouldnt be the problem.

Here is the code to send the file inside my controller:

def send_document     path = Document.find(params[:id]).path     puts path # for "ÄÖÜ.txt" gives "ÄÃ-ÃOE.txt" on console     send_file(path) # gives: Cannot read file ÄÖÜ.txt in browser end

Did anybody already have a similar problem or can give me some advice how to fix this? Thanks in advance, Erik Weitnauer.