Ruby read CSV file as UTF-8 and/or convert ASCII-8Bit encoding to UTF-8

Question

I\'m using ruby 1.9.2

I\'m trying to parse a CSV file that contains some French words (e.g. spécifié) and place the contents in a MySQL database.

Answer 1

I have been dealing with this issue for a while and not any of the other solutions worked for me.

The thing that made the trick was to store the conflictive string in a binary File, then read the File normally and using this string to feed the CSV module:

tempfile = Tempfile.new("conflictive_string")
tempfile.binmode
tempfile.write(conflictive_string)
tempfile.close
cleaned_string = File.read(tempfile.path)
File.delete(tempfile.path)
csv = CSV.new(cleaned_string)