From: Carlos Date: 2005-03-24T03:41:05+09:00 Subject: Re: Strings compares in UTF-8 and ANSI [Peter C , 2005-03-23 19.19 CET] > I'm grabbing strings from an IE browsers using WATIR. The text in IE > is encoded in UTF-8 and shows up correctly in a DOS prompt. I want to > do string compares between this UTF-8 string with a ANSI string from > my script. How can I convert the UTF-8 to an ANSI? I don't know what are ANSI strings. If they are 8-bit, latin-1 encoded strings, then you can convert between them and utf8 using pack and unpack: utf8 -> latin1: "abcd".unpack("U*").pack("C*") latin1 -> utf8: "abcd".unpack("C*").pack("U*") HTH