From: Axel Date: 2009-07-30T22:00:13+09:00 Subject: Re: How to save string to a file as UTF-8 You can try require 'iconv' myEncoding = 'iso-8859-15' # or 'CP1252' or what you have s1 = 'ü' s1 = Iconv.new('utf-8', myEncoding ).iconv(s1) Maybe, you will need the "Byte-order mark". That are 3 special Bytes at the very beginning of your utf8-file: wikipedia.org > utf-8 > "Byte-order mark"