How to use utf-8 encoded data in erb template

Question

I have an data-file stored with utf-8 encode, and I want to embed the data to an erb template. The data-file is explicitly encoded with utf-8 at the top. But while

Answer 1

In the scenario where you have an ERB template rendering strings from another file that is in UTF-8, adding the following to the top of the ERB template solved it for me:

<%# coding: UTF-8 %>

(instead of <% # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- %>)