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

I used to do this for a script that scraped Greek Windows-encoded pages, using open-uri, iconv and Hpricot:

doc = open(DATA_URL)
doc.rewind
data = Hpricot(Iconv.conv('utf-8', "WINDOWS-1253", doc.readlines.join("\n")))

I believe that was Ruby 1.8.7, not sure how things are with ruby 1.9