ASCII TO UTF 8 CONVERTER ONLINE CODE

Like I said last week, keeping different interpretations of the same data straight in your head is hard! But if youвЂ™re confused, exploring in an irb console will help. That way, I could spot-check the small number of strings that changed, and make sure they didnвЂ™t break any further. Whenever I found a badly encoded string, I printed it out, along with its replacement: Changing title with ID 6 from 'TheyГўв‚¬в„ўre over there!' to 'TheyвЂ™re over there!' I used another useful tool to help: my eyes. The last time I fixed this kind of bug, though, I wanted to play it safe. This works well if a character like Гў wonвЂ™t ever appear in a valid string. You can use a heuristic: only change strings that have one of the bad characters in them, like Гў. If you run it on good data, youвЂ™ll just turn it into bad data.

ASCII TO UTF 8 CONVERTER ONLINE CODE

If thatвЂ™s the case, you canвЂ™t blindly run that code on every string: irb(main):007:0> 'theyГўв‚¬в„ўre'.

Especially if that data came from the people visiting your site. And not every file or record is necessarily badly encoded вЂ“ you might have a mix of good and bad data. Unfortunately, you probably found this problem because a bunch of files or database records had badly encoded data in it. Then, use force_encoding to force that mis-encoded Windows-1252 string to be read as UTF-8: irb(main):006:0> 'theyГўв‚¬в„ўre'. Use encode to convert the UTF-8 string back into a Windows-1252 string. To fix it, you just have to follow those backwards steps. Whose bytes should have been read as UTF-8 (theyвЂ™re) How do you get things back to normal? LetвЂ™s think about the problem backwards:Д¬onverted from a Windows-1252 string, (theyГўв‚¬в„ўre) And if you didnвЂ™t know how it happened, itвЂ™d be almost impossible to untangle it. Those broken characters now look like theyвЂ™re supposed to be there. Your string has been badly-encoded twice. Ruby will helpfully convert it to UTF-8 for you, so youвЂ™ll end up with: irb(main):004:0> 'theyвЂ™re'. But youвЂ™ll probably save that data to a database, or a file, as UTF-8. The data is supposed to be UTF-8, but is being misread as Windows-1252. encode('UTF-8') to display the string in the console.) You can check this in irb: irb(main):003:0> 'theyвЂ™re'. So, which encoding would represent as Гўв‚¬в„ў? If you look at a few tables of popular encodings, youвЂ™ll see itвЂ™s Windows-1252. Instead, each byte is showing up as a different character. It seems like those three bytes should be read as UTF-8, where theyвЂ™d represent a curly quote. That seems like more than a coincidence, right? And our messed up string, theyГўв‚¬в„ўre, has three characters where it should just have one. When you focus on just the curly quote: irb(main):002:0> 'вЂ™'. bytes => Д®ven though the string only has 7 characters, theyвЂ™re represented by 9 bytes! So some characters, like the curly quote вЂ™, are represented with more than one byte: irb(main):001:0> 'theyвЂ™re'. Not every character can be represented in a single byte, because there are more than 256 possible characters. Last week, you learned that an encoding is just a way to turn groups of meaningless bytes into displayable characters. You could create a giant table, so you could find bad characters and replace them with good ones: Д«ut thereвЂ™s an easier, more reliable way to fix those broken characters. (Or maybe youГўв‚¬в„ўve seen it?) ItвЂ™s when a curly quote turns into Гўв‚¬в„ў, or an em-dash turns into Гўв‚¬вЂќ. But thereвЂ™s one encoding problem thatвЂ™s much harder to solve.

In last weekвЂ™s article, you learned a short process that solves most encoding problems.

Ascii to utf 8 converter online