Encoding error in content get from open-uri in ruby on rails

Question

In some cases when I use open to get a web page in Ruby the content of the page has an encoding error. Example:

open("http://www.google.com.br").read

Chars like ç and ã are replaced by ?

How can I get the right chars?

Answer 1

this seems to work:

require 'iconv'
i = Iconv.new('UTF-8','LATIN1')
i.iconv(open('http://google.com.br').read)

Answer 2

Running Ruby 1.9.2 here. Your code yields HTML which contains words like this:

Configura\xE7\xF5es

So on my work machine at least (Vista, using Windows CMD console), it returns HTML escaped characters.

Also, as far as I know, Ruby 1.9.2 is "almost" fully Unicode compliant, so I am guessing you shouldn't have UTF-8 issues unless your console cannot handle printing UTF-8 characters.

Hope that helps.