How can I convert a string from windows-1252 to utf-8 in Ruby?

Question

I\'m migrating some data from MS Access 2003 to MySQL 5.0 using Ruby 1.8.6 on Windows XP (writing a Rake task to do this).

Turns out the Windows string data is encod

Answer 1

If you're on Ruby 1.9...

string_in_windows_1252 = database.get(...)
# => "Fåbulous"

string_in_windows_1252.encoding
# => "windows-1252"

string_in_utf_8 = string_in_windows_1252.encode('UTF-8')
# => "Fabulous"

string_in_utf_8.encoding
# => 'UTF-8'