From: John Griffiths Date: 2009-01-17T03:44:26+09:00 Subject: converting multi-byte strings on Windows? basically i'm reading in a csv file in Windows and it contains a lot of multi-byte data (squigles, male-female signs etc.), now it's going to be passed to mysql to insert into the database but because of these weird characters it screws up the "fdsfdsf" in the queries and breaks the operation. Any ideas how to get this data into something like ascii or proper unicode. i've tried these... data.gsub(/[‘]/, '\\\\\‘') Iconv.iconv("UTF-8", "UTF-8", data) HTMLEntities.encode_entities(data) but no dice, i'm probably doing things wrong but would love to know a proper way around this ? stuck and in need of advice? -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.