ruby Dir.entries doesn't recognize special characters

Question

I'm using

Dir.entries("myFolder")

to get all the filenames. The problem is that instead of some special characters I get placeholders for them. The error occurs if filenames contain special characters like Č, Š and so on.

I've specified the file encoding:

#encoding: utf-8.

On linux this worked, on Windows it doesn't.

Result from the test in irb:

[".", "..", "MA\xC8KA.png", "PES.png", "VLAK.png", "\x8EOGA.png"]

It should be:

[".", "..", "MAČKA.png", "PES.png", "VLAK.png", "ŽOGA.png"]

Is there any other way of fixing this other than substituting these characters if there are any?

--------EDIT-----------

irb(main):001:0> Dir.entries("myFolder").map {|e| e.force_encoding('Windows-1250').encode('UTF-8')}

=> [".", "..", "MA\u010CKA.png", "PES.png", "VLAK.png", "\u017DOGA.png"]

irb(main):002:0> Dir.entries("myFolder").map {|e| e.force_encoding('UTF-8')}

=> [".", "..", "MA\xC8KA.png", "PES.png", "VLAK.png", "\x8EOGA.png"]

--------EDIT-----------

---------EDIT 2-------------

#encoding: utf-8
require 'green_shoes'

Shoes.app do

  button "Get sample image name" do
    @words_images = Dir.entries("myFolder").each {|word| word.gsub!(".png", "")}
    @words_images.delete(".")
    @words_images.delete("..")
    @test.append{para @words_images.sample}
  end

  @test = stack do
  end

end

---------EDIT 2-------------

Thank you.

Regards, Seba

Answer 1

I solved the issue by passing the encoding option when reading the files in the directory:

Dir.entries("myFolder", encoding: "utf-8")

Any attempt later on to change or force change the encoding failed.

A reminder to myself to read the docu more carefully...

regards, seba