I receive "incompatible character encodings: CP850 and UTF-8" when displaying the £ symbol on my ramaze app

Question

I receive "incompatible character encodings: CP850 and UTF-8" when displaying the £ symbol on my ramaze app. How can I get rid of this error? I have the UTF-8 meta tag in my head tag.

It happens when I type the £ symbol with the keyboard. Look.

I have put the following code in my ruby file and it hasn't fixed the problem.

# encoding: UTF-8 
Encoding.default_external = 'utf-8'
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8

Answer 1

Try to force the encoding to see if that makes the problem go away:

your_string.force_encoding(::Encoding::UTF_8)

If it does, dive into your app and spot what is setting the wrong encoding, where, and why.

It's possibly server-/webpage-related, as in the page you're serving is rendered as US-ASCII owing to a header. Or the server is started with encoding other than UTF-8. Or something other to that effect. Your script ends up with a piece of external data that isn't UTF-8.

Answer 2

Windows issue? Try using Iconv:

Iconv.conv('utf-8', "WINDOWS-1253", X)