utf-8 htmlentities,decode keeps switching to ascii-8bit

Hi there, it's not really rubyonrails but because it fits into the web-development I think I'm in the right forum.

I'm trying to decode a string I read from an online xml-file and compare it to another, locally stored one.

The locally stored string is: p localstring #=> "~St0rm€lite~" p localstring.encoding #=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>

The xml-file is saved as utf-8 and was read via HPricot. p remotestring #=> "~St0rm&#8364;lite~" p remotestring.encoding #=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>

Now I want to decode the remote string. To do this I'm using htmlentities4.2.0 installed via gem, however it breaks the string completely: require 'htmlentities' htmldecoder = HTMLEntities.new p htmldecoder.decode(remotestring) #=> "~St0rm\xE2\x82\xAClite~" p htmldecoder.decode(remotestring).encoding #=> #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>

I'm trying to fix this the past 3-4 days but I didn't find a solution. I tried to convert it again to utf-8 but this make the string getting even worser. Also converting the local-string to ASCII-8BIT fails.

I looked up my system configuration: My shell is running as UTF-8, also I installed 'locales': p Locale.current #=> [#<Locale::Tag::Posix: en_US.UTF-8>]

Is there any other settings I need to look up and configure? If I try the script on another computer I get the right results but here it keeps switching to ASCII-8BIT. My Ruby version is 1.9

I would be happy if someone could help me.