From: Alex Young <alex@...>
Date: 2007-05-14T23:48:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Reading Files: how to I specify the encoding ?

Claus Hausberger wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I have a lot of xml and java files witch have German Umlauts and other
> non ASCII files in them.
> 
> I want to read the files and convert them to UTF-8 using a Ruby script.
> 
> I convert the strings with this code:
> 
> def to_utf8(str)
>   str.unpack('U*').map do |c|
I'd be surprised if this was right - you're telling it that you're 
expecting the string to be UTF-8 already with that unpack format.

<snip>
> how can I read a file with Ruby and specify that it is read with
> ISO-8859-1 encoding (similar to Java's BufferedReader where I can
> specify the encoding).

Investigate Iconv in the standard library.  It does what you need.

-- 
Alex