file - How to convert a string to UTF8 in Ruby

Question

I'm writing a crawler which uses Hpricot. It downloads a list of strings from some webpage, then I try to write it to the file. Something is wrong with the encoding:

"xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

I have items which are rendered on a webpage and printed this way:

D??veloppement

the str.encoding returns UTF-8, so force_encoding('UTF-8') doesn't help. How may I convert this to readable UTF-8?

Answer 1

Your string seems to have been encoded the wrong way round:

"D??veloppement".encode("iso-8859-1").force_encoding("utf-8")
#=> "Développement"