Force strings to UTF-8 from any encoding

Question

In my rails app I\'m working with RSS feeds from all around the world, and some feeds have links that are not in UTF-8. The original feed links are out of my control, and i

Answer 1

Only this solution worked for me:

string.encode('UTF-8', 'binary', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: '')

Note the binary argument.