Converting multi-byte strings on Windows?

Ruby
1

basically i’m reading in a csv file in Windows and it contains a lot of
multi-byte data (squigles, male-female signs etc.), now it’s going to be
passed to mysql to insert into the database but because of these weird
characters it screws up the “fdsfdsf” in the queries and breaks the
operation.

Any ideas how to get this data into something like ascii or proper
unicode.

i’ve tried these…

data.gsub(/[‘]/, ‘\\\‘’)
Iconv.iconv(“UTF-8”, “UTF-8”, data)
HTMLEntities.encode_entities(data)

but no dice, i’m probably doing things wrong but would love to know a
proper way around this ?

stuck and in need of advice?

2

think i solved it,

puts Iconv.iconv('US-ASCII//TRANSLIT', 'utf-8',s).to_s