I wrote some time ago a post about how to deal with some strange characters (Brazilan Portuguese in my case) that appears mysteriously sometimes in our dear Rails apps.
Note that is is a different problem that the Multibyte solves.
For Latin languages, this can be quite annoying and most times very difficult to deal with. I read a article, I will try to find it, but it basically teach us to stop doing anything related to programing unless you do understand what character encoding mean. Can't find it but for the purpose of this post, it is well said.
But it happens that there is *one* way of doing this and the *right* way of doig thing.
So, my first post was one way.
And this is the right way :
require 'iconv' ic_translit1 = Iconv.new( 'UTF-8//IGNORE//TRANSLIT','WINDOWS-1252') @file=ic_translit1.iconv(@file)
You should transform the text between the various encodings by correctly initializing the Iconv object.
Consider what the input text encoding and the output (usually UFT-8 in Rails) you have to display.
Hope this helps.
