Convert non-ASCII chars from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

Question

I\'m pulling text from remote sites and trying to load it into a Ruby 1.9/Rails 3 app that uses utf-8 by default.

Here is an example of some offending text:

Answer 1

This works for me:

#encoding: ASCII-8BIT
str = "\xC2\xA92011 AACR"
p str, str.encoding
#=> "\xC2\xA92011 AACR"
#=> #

str.force_encoding('UTF-8')
p str, str.encoding
#=> "©2011 AACR"
#=> #