How to convert a string to UTF8 in Ruby

Your string seems to have been encoded the wrong way round:

"DÃ©veloppement".encode("iso-8859-1").force_encoding("utf-8")#=> "Développement"

ruby file encoding utf-8 dump

Seems your string thinks it is UTF-8, but in reality, it is something else, probably ISO-8859-1.

Define (force) the correct encoding first, then convert it to UTF-8.

In your example:

puts "DÃ©veloppement".encode('iso-8859-1').encode('utf-8')

An alternative is:

puts "\xC3".force_encoding('iso-8859-1').encode('utf-8') #-> Ã

If the Ã makes no sense, then try another encoding.

ruby file encoding utf-8 dump

"ruby 1.9: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8" described another good approach with less code:

file_contents.encode!('UTF-16', 'UTF-8')

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