From: "Y. NOBUOKA" Date: 2011-01-07T03:53:26+09:00 Subject: Re: From UTF-8 to windows-1252 Hello, > But when I get the data from the DB with my program I want to process > them in Windows-1252 again. So, if I use encode with windows-1252 I get > an error > >   mydata.encode("windows-1252") Although an encoding of the data from the DB is UTF-8, ruby doesn't know the encoding, so you must do tell ruby the encoding before encoding to Windows-1252. # tell ruby the encoding mydata.force_encoding( "UTF-8" ) # encode to windows-1252 mydata.encode( "windows-1252" ) Regards, -- nobuoka