From: Jean-Denis Muys <jdmuys@...>
Date: 2009-02-20T23:05:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Problem with special characters


> From: Alejandro Michelin salomon <amichelins@gmail.com>
> Reply-To: <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
> Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
> Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:04:38 +0900
> To: ruby-talk ML <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
> Subject: Problem with special characters
> 
> Hi:
> 
> O.S Windows XP sp3
> Ruby 1.8.6
> 
> I am working with ruby using DBI::Mysql, and the returned descriptions
> are not displayed ok. The puts command is displaying wrong characters,
> when the text has special chars like á.
> 
[snip]
> 
> How to display the text with special characters like 'ç ú í' tha are
> used commonly in latin languages?
> -- 
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
> 

I am facing a similar issue on Mac OS X where the TextMate console can only
use UTF8 encoding (The Mac terminal can be set to any encoding).

I asked a similar question to the TextMate mailing list, and I got a useable
workaround. Here is a very small program reading and printing the content of
a text file encoded in ISO-8859-1:

require "iconv"

file = File.open("test.txt", "r")
file.each {
  |line|
  print line
  print Iconv.iconv("UTF-8","LATIN1",line)
}
file.close

So I guess you can use the iconv library to convert in whichever direction
you may need.

Regards,

JD