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 want to convert a file named win1252file, on a unix OS, run:

$ iconv -f windows-1252 -t utf-8 win1252_file > utf8_file

You should probably be able to do the same on Windows with cygwin.