From: Lionel Bouton <lionel-subscription@...>
Date: 2008-04-04T01:25:04+09:00
Subject: Re: UTF-8 in Ruby

Vaibhav Bhandari wrote:
> [Note:  parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]
> 
> hi all -
> 
> Whats the recommended way to ensure that a string sent over the wire is
> UTF-8. I want to do a post to a web-service and the content needs to be
> UTF-8.
> 
> Whats the best way to do -
> "content".encoding('UTF-8')
> 

Hum, it depends on your context. If you don't know anything about the 
string and must make a guess, charguess or chardet are good tools.

Note that if you simply want to filter out content which can't be utf-8 
the following can be used,

class String
   def utf8_ok?
     utf8_ok = true
     begin
       # will raise an error (Iconv::InvalidSequence from memory)
       # on invalid utf-8 content
       Iconv.iconv(utf-8, utf-8, self)
     rescue
       utf8_ok = false
     end
     utf8_ok
   end
end

I use a slighty more complex version where I cache an Iconv instance. 
This helped solve my UTF-8 problems with one of my databases.

Lionel