From: "Xavier Noëlle" <xavier.noelle@...>
Date: 2010-02-24T00:18:36+09:00
Subject: Re: [ENCODING] UTF8 hell

2010/2/23 Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@ruby-lang.org>:
> 233 is not a valid UTF-8 character.  The byte sequence for médicals is
> <109 195 169 100 105 99 97 108 115>.

Indeed. In the meantime, I changed the code with this one:
def isUTF8()
  begin
    self.unpack('U*')
  rescue
    return false
  end
  return true
end

if isUTF8()
  self.force_encoding('UTF-8')
else
  self.force_encoding('ISO-8859-1')
  self.encode!('UTF-8')
end

This (ugly) quickfix works for what I need, but I don't know if this
problem can be somehow resolved in another way. The problem being that
my SQL database has a VARBINARY column with an unknown encoding. Is
there a way to deal with the various possible encoding or to ask MySQL
to return UTF8 converted data, or is it necessary to clean data before
inserting them ?

-- 
Xavier NOELLE