supporting iso-8859-1

hi guys, i want to display special characters in my view (german umlaute ä,ü,..). Can anyone tell me how to do this.

1. when i put a "ü" into my view it results in (using ü instead works fine, but i want to use it directly) ...

NoMethodError in Home#index Showing app/views/home/index.rhtml where line # raised:

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! You might have expected an instance of Array. The error occurred while evaluating nil.empty?

2. when i use an array within the "select" helper the umlaute are rendered with a question-mark

thx for your help

sorry guys i have found the problem. i need to save the files as UTF-8 then it works correctly.

is it safe to store all the files with utf-8 encoding?